\n
![](\"https:\/\/progressive.org\/downloads\/21662\/download\/ChrisHayes.jpg?cb=320d8b2352f144ac9685cee26ab4020b\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
Years before billionaire owner Jeff Bezos\u00a0remade<\/a>\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s opinion section as American media\u2019s premier tribune for oligarchy, the newspaper adopted the slogan \u201cDemocracy Dies in Darkness.\u201d<\/p>\n True enough. Indeed, what troubles so many advocates for independent journalism is the prospect that Bezos\u2019s new editorial line will jettison critiques of the many ways in which the billionaire class assaults democracy, creating a \u201cdarkness\u201d that is all too likely to confirm the accuracy of\u00a0The Post\u2019s shibboleth.<\/p>\n But democracy might be just as threatened by the dwindling attention spans of a growing number of American voters who struggle, from election to election, to keep track of the Constitution-shredding lawlessness of cynical politicians\u2014starting with Donald Trump, but certainly not ending with him\u2014who prey on the manufactured absentmindedness of a distracted electorate.<\/p>\n That is no small matter, as Chris Hayes understands.<\/p>\n The MSNBC host has written what will very likely turn out to be the most important political book of the moment. Yet, it comes under the guise\u2014as all important books do\u2014of a statement about the broader condition of society. In\u00a0The Sirens\u2019 Call: How Attention Became the World\u2019s Most Endangered Resource<\/a><\/em>, Hayes explains how \u201cattention capitalism\u201d\u2014a loose term for the money-making schemes of tech billionaires who build their fortunes by collecting the data that we shed while scrolling endlessly on their social media platforms\u2014has become a dominant force in our lives. This is something most of us know, at least instinctually, from our own experience and from observing those around us\u2014especially our TikTok-obsessed children and grandchildren. But, with this new book, Hayes does what only the ablest public intellectual can. He puts the situation in a broader perspective that flips a recognition switch, by explaining that, \u201cNow our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.\u201d<\/p>\n That sounds apocalyptic. Yet, when Hayes and I talked about his book, he remained hopeful for humanity. \u201cPeople have a kind of an addictive, love-hate relationship [with the rapid flow of information and entertainment] that is hard for people to deal with. But part of that addictive, love-hate relationship is a product of the technologies\u2014including cable news\u2014that are there to get people to pay attention all the time,\u201d says Hayes, who counsels that it is possible to break such patterns. \u201cMore and more people are just turning away from it. Daily active users for most of these platforms are declining . . . . That sense of being fed up\u2014and the sense of alienation\u2014is so profound that people are going to increasingly drop out.\u201d<\/p>\n But just dropping out does not necessarily save society\u2014or change our broken politics. There has to be a middle ground where Americans are informed and engaged, without being overwhelmed, and without being manipulated into cycles of fear and rage.<\/p>\n Hayes describes this as \u201cthat loop of conflict, aggressiveness, doom, darkness, and conspiracy that I think is the mode of keeping attention that is fundamentally reactionary.\u201d<\/p>\n This is where the discussion turns to practical politics and \u201cthe attentional dominance\u201d that proved to be highly beneficial to Trump in 2024.<\/p>\n Hayes is not one of those authors who claim that their new book explains everything. Indeed, that\u2019s what makes\u00a0The Sirens\u2019 Call<\/em>\u00a0such a vital book.<\/p>\n \u201cLook, I think inflation plus [Joe] Biden\u2019s age gets you a lot of the way there toward the outcome [of Trump\u2019s election victory]. The incumbent President had a very low approval rating. The majority said the country was on the wrong track. Those are bad structural factors for an incumbent party trying to get re-elected\u2014even if the candidate did change,\u201d he tells me. \u201cBut the third thing was just the attentional dominance [of messaging from Trump and his Republican allies], and particularly the attentional salience of negativity, and the dominance of negativity, in the atmosphere. That, I think, was a 100 percent dispositive thing that tipped things over.\u201d<\/p>\n In contrast to Trump and a rising class of Republicans who mimic the President\u2019s approach to politics\u2014and now to governance\u2014Hayes explains \u201cthe idea that Democrats are sort of conflict-averse, and risk-averse, in ways that mean they get less attention, and that is pretty bad for them in the current landscape. Trump has figured out something about attention that Democrats have struggled to [understand].\u201d<\/p>\n The bottom line, I suggest to him, is that the contemporary reality of how attention capitalism operates\u2014and the GOP\u2019s frequent attentional dominance of the discourse\u2014has been highly beneficial to Trump and Trumpism. \u201cUltimately, yes,\u201d Hayes replies. \u201cAbsolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n This is an immediate lesson from\u00a0The Sirens\u2019 Call<\/em>, and an argument for why people who care about the twin crises of communications and democracy in the United States\u2014and, arguably, Western democracy as we have known it in the post-World War II era\u2014ought to pay serious attention to what Hayes is telling us.<\/p>\n That perspective will be needed if the United States and other countries around the world are going to break the grip of the billionaire oligarchs who are buying up media platforms and making them\u2014or simply, for reasons of rank profiteering, allowing them to become\u2014vehicles for propagandistic missives that overwhelm honest debate and amplify the racist and xenophobic fear mongering of rightwing politicians. It gets us to the next stage of an old debate about media and politics that has defined much of my adult life.<\/p>\n When Bezos announced that he was remaking the opinion pages of\u00a0The Post<\/em>\u00a0to serve as a tribune for the worldview of the richest people on the planet, he explained his decision with a laughable assertion that advocacy for his brand of uber-capitalism\u2014billionaire-driven oligarchy\u2014was \u201cunderserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.\u201d Anyone who has ever watched business channels on cable television or read the editorial page of\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u2014where support for so-called free markets is used as an excuse to champion corporate monopoly, price gouging, union busting, and grotesque income inequality\u2014knows that the billionaire class gets plenty of attention. Bezos\u2019s move led author Rick Perlstein to email me with a reflection on\u00a0The Death and Life of American Journalism<\/a><\/em>\u00a0and other books that Robert W. McChesney and I wrote in the 2000s about the threat posed to journalism and democracy by the ever-expanding corporate control of communications.<\/p>\n Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Ben Bagdikian, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Herman, McChesney and I began writing twenty-five years ago on what we understood as an emerging crisis in American media. Our argument was simple: The rapid prioritization of bottom-line commercial and entertainment impulses over journalistic and democratic values was leading to more inequality, more corruption, more division, and a decay of civil society that could upend honest debate. Bill Moyers embraced the argument and\u00a0hosted us<\/a>\u00a0frequently<\/a>\u00a0on his public television show, giving us an opportunity to explain the vital linkages between media and democracy to millions of Americans. Members of Congress including Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Louise Slaughter, and Jesse Jackson Jr. played critical roles in opening up debates about media ownership issues in the early 2000s, as did Federal Communications Commission members Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, and leaders of Common Cause and MoveOn, as well as The Newspaper Guild, and other unions. But what was most heartening was the embrace of the critique by grassroots activists, who recognized it as a tool for explaining not just the challenges facing journalism but the disintegration of democracy.<\/p>\n The fight for genuine media reform goes on\u2014and is now more necessary than ever in this age of disinformation, misinformation, and propagandistic politics. Yet, it also evolves, as we learn more and more about the pressures on American society that have emerged in a new media age where AI-supercharged communications are more rapid, more immersive, and more manipulative. This new reality is the fertile ground that is explored by Hayes\u2019s book, which, in my view, provides an explanation not just for the political moment but also for how to get out of it.<\/p>\n