The Globe’s Jeff Jacoby wonders if the nation can cool down the apocalyptic rhetoric following the Trump assassination attempt. He doesn’t provide an answer. But the NYT’s Peter Baker does: No. … My own reaction? No, too. Why? The media. 

The media is not the sole cause of today’s apocalyptic political environment. But it is a major and often overlooked cause, stretching back decades when “Point/CounterPoint” (CBS) and “Crossfire” (CNN) first started treating political differences as political theater and entertainment. Political conflict was built into these shows. Even when they tried to be civil (“Firing Line”), political conflict was at its implied core.

Fox News Channel took this to an entirely new level when it was founded in 1996. Its business model is built on promoting and profiting from divisiveness. Does anyone seriously doubt this after reading the internal Fox emails tied to the infamous Dominion libel case?  Here’s the Fox formula for profiting off of conflict: Find the divisive issue of the day, hammer into it relentlessly, generate outrage, create us-vs-them viewer loyalty, attract advertisers, generate profits. It’s worked. Fox News is the most-watched cable TV news channel in the U.S., generating hundreds of millions of dollars in profits per year.

Do you really think Fox News will simply give up this mega-profitable conflict franchise, ceding its top conservative media status to right-wing upstarts like Newsmax? What about lefty us-vs-them imitators like MSNBC? Again, conflict is built into their business models. They rely on viewers who watch programs to confirm their political beliefs, not to have them challenged. Ditto many of those using Substack, podcasts and other social-media outlets to profit (hopefully) from their political views.

What about other media outlets, such as old print/digital stalwarts like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Boston Globe etc.? Only recently have some media critics and other industry observers acknowledged that, well, okay, the MSM has long had a liberal-leaning bias stretching back decades. I’d argue that that bias only got worse after Trump won the presidency in 2016, with many outlets, officially or unofficially, adopting (or being pressured to adopt) anti-both-sideism approaches to news coverage while pronouncing “objectivity” dead. I.e., they used anti-both-sideism as a fig leaf to take sides. They drifted left. And they reaped the rewards in terms of the huge Trump bump in digital subscriptions, even as journalists like Marty Baron bemoaned the shift away from objectivity. Many MSM outlets have clearly benefited from anti-Trump conflict.

To be clear: I’m not saying there aren’t stark ideological differences that are contributing to today’s polarized political environment. Extremism and political polarization existed long before the advent of radio, TV and social media etc. 

But I am saying the modern media is at least partly to blame for today’s politically toxic, apocalyptic environment – and the media isn’t going to suddenly change for the good of the country. Their business models won’t allow it.