Faced with the perception of extreme situations, people come up with more extreme answers. The outcome is people determined to argue their position and intolerance of anyone who disagrees. Politicians seem to feed off and reflect this.
In my view, however, we have the politicians we have because of the way we receive our news and opinion today. It is not that politicians are changing the way we think. It is that social media and exaggerated clickbait headlines, without the editorial filtering we used to have when our news sources were few and opinion was restricted to the editorial pages, have created demand among consumers for louder politicians with more extreme views.
Let me make my case, while I pour you a glass of wine.
When we had just a handful of newspapers and television channels, the news was filtered through those channels so that even if the news source was left- or right-leaning, only news worth reading (in the opinion of that editor) was printed or broadcast. Extremes never made it to press or air. Fake news, for the most part, did not exist. The news sources broadly catered to a sensible center ground, be it center left or center right, or one that was business focused.
Then the internet came along, and print and distribution costs (whether physical paper or broadcast television) dropped. Barriers to entry for production and selling of news fell away. In addition, everyone now had a mobile phone that came with a decent camera. The result was that from multiple news sources we went to thousands (perhaps more accurately billions, given mobile phone penetration), and all of it has today found a way to get to readers or viewers via social media. Very little editing or filtering is happening. We can all read almost anything we want from almost any source we want, mostly for free, and with very little fact checking and few points of reference for what is now the “middle-ground”.
The birth of clickbait
Then comes advertising. In an offline media world, we told advertisers what type of audience we had, and they mostly believed us (we provided independent reader/viewer surveys) and paid us accordingly. In an online media world, we can tell exactly how many people actually saw the ad, the few who clicked through, and the fewer still who clicked again and went to an advertiser product or service page. Advertisers, understandably, love this detail. So much so, that they almost never pay now unless we provide them with evidence of page views and click throughs. So, we need to make sure people click through to those pages, which means headlines have started becoming a little louder and sometimes a little exaggerated, to make sure we got those views. Thus was born clickbait headlines and articles — even in the so-called serious media.