Watch The Language

Histrionics, Hyperbole and Headlines

I am finding my way on Substack, learning how to use its tools. This week I restacked a simple announcement that Pete Buttigieg is considering a run for the Senate.

My note said:

“This man has integrity, intelligence, and a calm fearlessness that is deeply admirable. He cuts through GOP lies with precision. And he does it without raising his voice or breaking a sweat.”

It got 3000 responses/restacks in 48 hours, when I did not yet have 100 followers. Why?

I think we all recognize that emotional control, the ability to use language precisely, calmly, and deliberately is a quality of leadership. We admire those who can let emotion fuel their words, not drive them. It projects maturity, impulse control and belief that you can win argument with facts, not just with noise.

But everything about contemporary culture says otherwise. Media leans into the most eye-catching headlines; the click bait that startles the reader into stopping, scanning, and hopefully buying. Exaggeration is cleverness, and cleverness catches us all.

Swearing is ubiquitous in entertainment, accenting almost every sentence as though all the nouns and verbs that language has to offer cannot possibly convey meaning without adding something offensive, violent or both.

And emotion has become the news. How outraged are YOU, CNN asks experts over and over, as though that is more important than the facts: what happened, when, where, and why, and how outrageous THOSE FACTS are.

Human interest stories long ago became emotional voyeurism, partly out of a need to fill a 24-hour news cycle, but partly because we’ve begun to centralize the importance of emotion beyond its value. How do you feel seeing your house burned to the ground? Really? Getting a real person to emote on camera gets praise, as though it’s the essence of the story, not its effect.

When I worked in a psychiatric hospital for children, I told my younger patients “Feelings are facts. They are like having blue eyes and brown hair. ‘Shouldn’t feel” makes me cringe like your English teacher does when you say ‘There ain’t no’, So let’s begin with what they are without judging them first.”

But feelings come from the most primitive parts of our brain, the reflective fight/flight, eat/be eaten, procreate/die-out instincts that keep all animal alive. They are what we share with animals, not what makes us human.

What makes us uniquely human is the ability to manage our feelings, to shape and shift them to conform to higher level standards of morality, ethics, and abstract reasoning. Perspective taking, context analysis, and empathy, all higher-level brain functions, need to come on board for that to happen. When “Tell me how you REALLY feel” is treated as the deepest level of understanding, we bypass the very things that elevate us.

It is, as I told the children, the place we begin to understand, but not where we end.

I read most of my news. I do not want someone else’s voice adding emotion to the story, so I avoid video clips and podcasts if I have a choice. I choose long form, and European news sources when I can. Most are not as emotion-ridden, and outrage-laden, as American sources seem to be. And I have one simple rule for talking heads: Tell me what happened in as much detail as you can. Do not tell me how to feel about it.

Here are a few thought experiments and exercises to try. See how they impact your peace of mind, your capacity for information, and your emotional resilience.

1. Imagine the term Breaking News replaced with Today’s News. Make the change in your own head each time you see that header.

2. Read the Chyron and ask if it matches the story or hyperbolizes its emotion. “FBI shocked; fear swirling through the FBI” are two I just saw in the midday news. I doubt that’s how most career agents who deal with criminals every day of the week are responding.

3. Mute your favorite news source whenever you are being told how to feel, or how the speaker feels, about the story. Try to gauge what percentage of your input is “emotion-bathing”. After a week, go back to full viewing. Did you miss it, like it, or not really care?

4. Write that angry post without swearing, using insults or demeaning language. It’s harder, I guarantee. Sometimes it’s impossible. But the effort to convey angry intensity, precise analysis and useful direction without screaming is worth it. Tolerance varies but readers turn off when their personal “insult meter” is full.

5. Watch Mayor Pete and those like him. Calm fearlessness, intellectual precision; even a sense of humor gets used to good effect. And his message is clear: I’m in control. I am not afraid to take you on. I do not have to demean myself to do so.

It’s not the style for everyone, and I admit it works best for wordsmiths, introverts, and those of us who thrive in solitary thought, not communal action. But finding your sweet spot is important to emotional resilience, and to effective action.