American politics is broken in a lot of ways. There are many reasons for this. A big one is what podcaster and former CNN host Michele Mitchell calls the “anger industrial complex,” the way that media companies are constantly working to keep their audiences angry all the time. 

It’s no grand conspiracy, rather it’s managers pursuing the natural incentives of for-profit media to keep ratings up, no matter the cost to society. 

This process basically on a grand scale with the arrival of Newt Gingrich and Fox News in the mid-1990s, both of which used outrage and anger to accumulate money and power. But it’s also the case that there are plenty of left-of-center media actors whose goal seems to be to create nihilism, to tell their audiences that political change is impossible and that it’s better to keep watching while you wait for the revolution.

In each episode of her podcast, The Cocktail Conversations, Mitchell assembles a panel of experts to talk about how the anger industrial conversation works, how polarization works, and ways that Americans can start having the difficult conversations that we need.

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