The Power of Being Controversial: How Political Figures and the Media Use Controversy to Their Advantage
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Everybody loves an occasional controversy, but they quickly become toxic if left unchecked. Bill Stierle and Tom continue their conversation about the power of acting controversial, this time elaborating on how political commentators’ opinions on politics can leave a rather lingering bitter taste in the mouth of the general public. They also highlight how controversial people, both in politics and media, use their power to their advantage without considering the impact they have on the people they are supposed to be serving. Join them for a healthy discussion on the news media and political figures that is always the talk of the town.
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Bill, in our last episode, there was a deeper dive we could have taken into the statements by Tucker Carlson and what we were talking about the power of being controversial. There's a lot more that has come out about it. I would call it a flip-flop. I think you would call it something else, wouldn't you?
Yeah, because it's a duality. A lot of the times, we talked about the concept of, "You were standing over here. You flip-flopped to this other position." Yet many times, these things are not as black and white as you think they are. They're not as polarizing or opposite as we think they are. It’s the need for financial security. The media empire, Tucker Carlson, Jake Tapper or whoever the person are all looking for people to watch them. Because they are all looking for people to watch them, a part of them needs to say or do things in a certain way that brings that population or that group of people towards them. They'll test outrageous things just to see if they can move the needle and gain the eyeballs they need to secure the advertisements that need to be.
If we were to choose as a society, we could make sure that when something is labeled news, it's got to have a 70% index on truth. That will change a lot of shows. It's then not the Laura Ingraham angle, it's the Laura Ingraham opinion. It's the Tucker Carlson opinion. It's the Sean Hannity "The way I see it.” It's like, "Yes, I see it that way.” Other people may see it that way and they make entertainment out of the way they see it. The marketplace will allow that show to stay on as long as people extend connection and respect towards that person. The only problem is when we get to bigger civic issues, what's best for the country, the state and the environment, if somebody has enough opinion, they can opinion us into a bad place. The power of being controversial is that the opinion gets stickability. The thing now has to do with a mask or no mask.
It was shocking to me to see that within two weeks, Tucker Carlson on March 30th, 2021 is saying that the science behind masks is clear and they work. He was making a very factual statement and he was supportive of it. Somehow within the next two weeks, all of a sudden, masks are equated with child abuse. He had a video where his guest was saying, "He's in Austin, Texas, walking down the street in the city without a mask. People are looking at him like he's crazy, doing something wrong or dangerous."
This person said, "It's the other way around. Those people wearing masks are offensive to me. They're outdoors. They have no reason to wear a mask," but then Tucker Carlson took it to another level and said and I’m paraphrasing here, "I would even take the analogy to a stronger place that when I see someone outdoors wearing a mask, that's as offensive to me as somebody walking down the street and exposing themselves.” “Put it away," he said. It's like, "Really? Somebody wearing a mask on the street is as offensive to you as somebody who is exposing themselves?"
If I'm looking for the need for financial security to be mad and I'm trying to get the engagement or the upset in my viewer to say, "I'm seeing something that is bothersome to me." Tucker Carlson and even Rachel Maddow on both sides do and say things. They experience an emotion so the viewer maintains loyalty and connection through the emotion of the need not being met. They're in that place of doing that. They're not equal. We can take and put a scale on how many factual things, near facts, half facts or partial facts that the person is promoting.
I had to do all levels because I always try to think of a needs-based narrative as like you have two scales. They say half thing twice and then it equals out the truth on this side. Do you see how weird this is going to get? It's like you're competing messaging and saturating something so you can sell toxic sludge as an energy drink. You push it large enough in that direction or say, "That environment was better served without the elephants living on it because now we can farm it." It's like, "No, we lost the elephants." Human beings will tend to spin things and rationale into their bias or belief, but they're setting aside the truth. That's unsettling.
It seems some of these opinion hosts change and spin it one way than the other. You called it the duality. It's all about what's going to get them the most attention at the moment.
It's all to activate the feeling inside the viewer because the viewer many times doesn't know what their needs are, the need for choice, independence and loyalty versus the need for health, the need for protection for others, and the need to collaborate. To live in civil society, we have to give and take things. We get everything we always want because otherwise, it's one person's dominating thought. A civil servant or a statesman is a person who says what's best for society and gets rid of the extreme ends. We don't particularly have that as much. We have more politicians and fewer statesmen.
I wish that there was a visual on this. When a person is running for a campaign, they need to have some type of colored scarf. Maybe one side has the scarf on this, but once they get elected, they needed both sides. They would take off the scarf and put on the new scarf to say, "From this moment on, I am going to pick what I think is best for our society and my constituents who voted for me, even though I said I would do something. Sorry, the thing I said that I would help you, I am keeping that in mind but it doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to do it because it's not for the good of all."
In business, this is valuable too. When we buy a product or service, how many times your customer has way more expectation of what you're going to do than what they signed up for or what the scope of what they paid for, and they completely expand beyond the truth. All of a sudden, you bring to them something that's a reality, "This is the contract. Here are the five items. I've nailed all the five." On the other side, the person is going, "Yes, but I thought I was going to." It’s like, "I would be willing to help you with that, but it's not fully on the contract."
That can tend to happen. It’s what we call scope creep of a service-related product. Despite how clear you are, a lot of times, people will just make it up in their mind what they thought should get. Somehow after the purchase, the scope changes in their mind. They think they should be getting more than what they paid for. Those are difficult conversations to have, but it has to happen. The other thing that's very difficult in customer service that's similar is you have a customer that you need them to make a decision on something and they haven't made a decision on it so you can't move forward. You ask them, "I need to know your decision on this item." They say, "I already made that decision." I was like, "What was that decision?" Some people's communication styles are weird, "I already told you, so you should have that." "I don't have it. I'm looking for it. What’s your decision" They don't tell you. There are all sorts of communication conundrums that we deal with in business.
If we go after it, that communication conundrum would be, "How do you empathize with somebody who's stuck?" My empathy line would be, "You're feeling torn and some confusion about what the best choice is. Part of you wants to choose this and part of you wants to choose that. You're not sure which one to pick." They have to say yes because they are not answering you anyways. You could guess there. A big part of proactive empathy is getting in touch with the thing that is knocking the human being out of making a decision on their behalf. The difference between something moral and ethical and something illegal. You got to see the difference between those things. The only way to get there is to manage or connect to your feelings and needs, as well as the person who you're speaking to because they're disconnected.
It's interesting you talked about the duality to get eyeballs. We're talking about something that Tucker Carlson said one week and then within two weeks, he said another. I see this on customers also where the customer says, "No, I don't want to change the name of my podcast. I want to continue with the name I have. I just want to rebrand it, have a new logo and some of the stuff." We go through it and then a month down the road, we're providing all the stuff and they say, "No, I'm not happy with the name. I want a new name." "Now, you want a new name?" "I always wanted a new name." This becomes the duality, "No. How did you not know? I always wanted a new name." It's not appropriate for me to play back the recording when they said they didn't want a new name. Now, they want a new name. It's like, "We can do that." You still have to empathize with them, "I hear that you're looking for a new name for your podcast. Is that correct?" "Yes," then we move on. The duality sometimes is not just to get eyeballs. Sometimes it's that somebody always needs to be right.
Self-worth as well as emotional safety is a need there that causes people to pick a different truth at a different moment.
That sounds very relevant here.
Let everybody settle out this. If we're holding the space of compassion and empathy, we've got to realize that people are going to pick a different truth in a different moment because multiple truths are going on many times. It's doesn't necessarily need to fall on something. When we get better at picking a different truth at a different time, it's like, "This is the truth I picked based on the information I had. At this moment, this is the truth that I'm picking. I'm picking a different truth at a different time." If Tucker Carlson gets a harder financial hit by this current controversial thing, then there's going to be backtrack silence, licking his wounds, seeing if he can reboot in another place.
Think of it a little bit like this. Pepsi tried this one. They had one of the Kardashians hand a Pepsi can to a police officer who was standing in riot gear. That commercial is a good awareness moment that being controversial could have paid off. There would have been things I would have done differently in the shot to make that work and demonstrate those that could be taking place. At which time, the next march that you have, the police officer would be marching and the crowd would be marching with the Pepsi in front of them. You got shields and you got Pepsi coming out there. I would love to see that image.
Human beings tend to spin things and rationale into their bias or belief, but they’re setting aside the truth.
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If they would have been ready with that gamble and throw that out there, people would have been totally cracked up and were like, "This first moment wasn't supposed to be something poignant. It was supposed to be something silly." You've just taken a controversial moment. You've shifted. Your brand recognition is going like, "That was pretty damn funny." At the same time, it's hard to talk about serious things like violence from the police and how hard it is to do that kind of safekeeping, as well as how hard it is to get Pepsi to get marketing traction. How hard it is for Tucker Carlson to try to solidify his base because he turned on them two weeks earlier when he said, "Masks are this." He got a ton of blowback and he’s like, “Should I be going there?” He turns and comes back on the other side and does something extremely different on the other side.
He’s attacking masks and anybody wearing them, including saying, "Having children wear masks is akin to child abuse." That's the shocking statement, which is getting more eyeballs.
You can interview 50 psychologists and you'll find five who will say, "Kids are much more anxious, nervous, and scared now than they were before the masks." The answer is good because that means their emotions are working correctly. Anxious, nervous, worried and scared is the right feeling sequence when there is a virus that might hurt somebody in your family. The way I described that is the message that's missing for the kid. We're wearing a mask because we're being considerate and protecting others. We're wearing a mask to care for ourselves and our family. We're wearing a mask so that our society can collaboratively work together.
I want to see the PSAs on those. By the way, I wrote somebody's PSA campaign about mask-wearing. How does a parent talk to their kids about masks? "Mommy, I don't want to wear the mask." "Do you feel hesitant and is the mask uncomfortable for you?" "Yes, I don't like it on my face." "You would not like to wear it on your face?" "Yes.” “I would like to not wear it on my face too. Would you be willing to hear what the good reason is why we're doing it?" You then give the message and the good reason. There are three good things.
Can you imagine if somebody like Tucker Carlson had a guest on his show who was not already in alignment with his thinking on this? There have been some but sometimes he shuts them down, especially if they're remote guests, which they pretty much all are. He won't let them speak. One of the videos that we put in the last episode's blog post showed where he was like, "No, you're done," and he has his producer cut him off. If he couldn't cut him off and somebody talks like you did in a reasonable way and say, "Tucker Carlson, are you not interested in providing that protection for your parents or your grandparents from this virus?"
The not-narrative is not as powerful as the power with narrative. Tom, you and I have talked about how language stacks on top of each other. As soon as you do a not-narrative, it's overlapping. To make it clean, it would sound like this, "We all can agree that getting the need for the safety net for our elderly Americans and our Americans who don't have wellness, it might be a good idea to wear masks. If you're not around those kinds of people, you could choose to get your need for freedom met at the expense of the health of others. I think that collectively, we're looking to all get the need for freedom to be restored as quickly as possible, is that correct?”
It's so much better than I started to say it. That's great.
You put the leads out, Tom. This is what's so fun about the show. You and I clean it up on the backend. The new way of thinking about communication is that we've got to do a better job of putting in collaborative narratives versus power-over narratives. The power-over narratives are winning. The reason why the power-over narratives are winning is that the language is set up into an adversarial, "We got to get this. There's a reward here. There's an accomplishment. We're going to go ahead and do that." We're not celebrating the journey as much as we need to. We are acknowledging the reward instead of recognizing what it takes to get the reward.
The way I like to think about it is this. When John F. Kennedy said, "We're going to go to the moon by the end of the decade," that was a lofty goal. He threw a few nickels behind it and NASA started blowing up rockets. Of course, the answer was, "We can't keep blowing up rockets. You guys got to get better at this." The scientists wound up getting better at this. They became more cautious and more safekeeping and more of this, but when you do that, you also lose creativity and innovation along the way because you're not moving it. What we're doing now is Elon Musk is blowing up rockets because he has enough money to test and fail. He got there quicker. If you have the revenue to test and fail, what happens is you can get success.
Now, in this new moment, I'm going to turn that narrative into being controversial. In marketing, people test and fail all the time. Former President Donald Trump used to test and fail until he succeeded with slogans during rallies. In business, it's A/B marketing. “Did this email work better than this email? Did I get their attention? Did I have them open the email? This is posting on social media. Did I get likes? Did I not get likes? My likes went away. They went over here. How did they go over here? How can I get my likes back?"
That does relate to what these opinion shows and hosts are doing.
They're not managing the journey as much as I would like them to because the journey is, how do you create a unified America that can have two people at a picnic or a Thanksgiving dinner and people know when the hell to shut up and remember why the hell they're there at the Thanksgiving dinner? They're there for the family. They're not there to work on their political issues out over a turkey. Regrettably, because there's so much pain about this and people are siloed a little bit, grandpa or uncle who's sitting at the table is going like, "At my age, at my time, you get to say what you want." I was like, "No, I don't think that was true back then. I think everybody came there and people knew when to shut up because they weren't there for that." There are other times to do those narratives, not at Thanksgiving. It was about things that were safer and more benign to talk about like sports and other things like that.
Self-worth as well as emotional safety is a need that causes people to pick a different truth at a different moment.
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With team sports, why is it that we can rib each other? I can trash the Miami Dolphins and you can trash the New England Patriots and we can have fun with that, trying to get each other's GOAT as it were. At the end of it, we can still be friends. Why is it so much more difficult with our politics?
The short answer is because those sports identities are not as fully attached to our self-worth and they're not occupying so much of our identity. Whereas when you're voting, the identity and loyalty piece get escalated. It's very hard to separate the two. As my brother would say, "There are a lot of sensitive people out there and if you become opinionated, they'll just click on, click away and won't buy from you." He's right and that's what happens to certain people on certain TV shows and things like that. The marketplace is saying, "No, I don't want that sitcom. I'm not going to be there. I’m out.” Why? Because there are no advertising dollars. There are no eyeballs there.
There is truth to "Don't be controversial," and then the other side says, "If you aren't controversial, you'll be able to stand out more on your side and there are plenty of customers over there who cares about the customers on the other side." That's why news media has split the way it has. They've polarized because the self-worth and the identity are so close together. Whereas in a sports team, you can take it or leave it and go like, "Is Miami going to put a team together this year? Is Cam Newton going to be the quarterback for the Patriots for more than another year? Is he going to get hurt on the way?" "I don't know. He's over-the-hill. He'll never be Tom Brady."
Television as a medium is a business and they need eyeballs in order to do business. I'm remembering now back to Howard Stern's book, Private Parts, which also was a movie. In the early or mid-'80s, Howard Stern was at the WNBC in New York and he was extremely controversial, pushing the edge of the envelope. When they studied data, when they researched the listeners, they said that people who love him listened for a total of an hour and a half every day. The reason why is they want to hear what he's going to say next. The people who hated him listened for two and a half hours a day. The number one reason they gave for why is they want to hear what he's going to say next. That's why he was called a shock jock. The shock does get attention and eyeballs and that's exactly what a lot of these opinion hosts are doing. I agree it happens on both sides. It happens with the Jake Tappers, the Don Lemons, the Chris Cuomos of the world, as well as the Sean Hannitys, the Tucker Carlsons, and the Laura Ingrahams, right?
That's correct. That's very unsettling because being able to and being mindful of how the listeners’ physiology is working to keep the engagement going is a part of it. Once money got more involved in politics through Citizens United, that's when the salespeople started coming out and more of the polarization took place and more of, "You can't vote across the aisle because your side, your people can't get anything done if you vote across the aisle." That's when the collaboration and cooperation took a nosedive and that's been tough. We will if we're going to get back to it and get the collaboration and cooperation to move to the front of the list again.
People struggle with it because when I say the word collaboration and cooperation, it has got to be emotionally safe for you not to get the thing you want in collaboration and cooperation. It's like, "We're going to go this way. We're going to see if it works and then we're going to go this way if it doesn't." One of the things the voters say when they're with Donald Trump is, "He's a strong leader." Actually, he's a strong messenger that messages an opinion and is okay about changing the message within the next 30 seconds. They like that he's able to talk from both sides and it sounds like he's leading and testing. There's a huge difference between leading and testing.
Like he said on January 6th, 2021, "March down the street. You're going to have to fight like hell if you want to have a country anymore." A couple of hours later, he was putting out a video trying to say, "Everybody, go home” or whatever. He’s changing the message quite a bit from storming the Capitol.
All he just did was take the hornet's nest, put it out there and hit it with the stick. Everybody was hitting with the stick to get the hornets moving. It's not the hornet's fault as much. The hornets aren't thinking. They're going, "Protection, safety, identity, integrity, trust and loyalty." That's what they're doing.
They're reacting to being poked with the stick.
They don't know what their needs are. They just know they feel bad and angry and the leader told them to go get their needs met. The emotion then takes over and then the police officer doesn't look like a human being anymore, "Aren't you voting for? Don't you support the police?" “Not these police. These police are traitors. These police are sworn in. They're not doing their job.” The rational mind is going to pick the thread that validates their identity and stays lock-step with that until they ask themselves the real question, "Is this my identity? Is this the way I would like America to be when I just like to walk down a street and go, "They have a mask. They don't have a mask?" It looks like that group is going for health, safety and cooperation. The other group is going for freedom and choice.
How about that? Live and let live.
"I can see you over there without a mask. If you start walking towards me, I want to let you know I will be walking away from you because I'm working on the safety and cooperation of the nation. You're not working on that, but that's what I'm working on." It's helpful stuff. There is more to come on this, Tom. It's not like it's not going to be controversial. We got to decide, is it going to be a week or a month before we got to do truth and the power of controversial statements? Are we going through a week? We used to not be able to get through a week without having five controversial statements.
Definitely, the temperature has come down in a lot of ways and all media is not necessarily giving oxygen to every controversial statement the way they did when the former president had his Twitter account. We come into our sessions to record and sometimes we're like, "What do we want to talk about now?" It's not so obvious. I think it's a good thing very much.
It allows us to go deeper on issues and for us to be reactive too.
Bill, thanks so much for that.
Thanks, everybody for reading.
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