Outrage, Inc.

When I was a kid, I was big into conservationism.  I thought re-using things and recycling things was pretty cool.  We had a guy on our street that worked for Reynolds Aluminum Recycling Company (as I remember it, anyway; I could be wrong), and I remember driving with my dad to a semi trailer set up in a parking lot in Layton to drop off a bag of old aluminum cans and get a few dollars in return.  It seemed like a pretty cool thing to a kid.  I watched National Geographic specials about the ozone hole with interest and once even got a book from those Scholastic catalogs they always send around in schools about things kids could do to save the planet and stave off the impending ice age.

Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood by Derek Hunter (ISBN: 978-0-06-283552-9) talks about that very ice age and how it never came, but the same alarmism that drove the talk about it has not abated at all.  In fact, according to Hunter, the hype about the ice age’s replacement cause, climate change, is exponentially greater and has been combined with overwrought hype about dozens of other issues.  The thesis of Hunter’s work is that that hype is lacking a foundation in reality, but has overtaken all of pop culture, a lot of the news media, and a lot of the scientific world.  He talks a lot about the Leftist bias in all of those areas that the Right so often complains about.  In each section, he provides concrete examples and then some analysis to drive home the points being made.  He digs into some things that many readers probably would not even consider on their own, such as the budgets (and sources of those same budgets) for various movies.  He found that while the movie studios and producers make their mainstream fare, they also unabashedly spend millions on agenda-driven movies that usually don’t do well at the box office.  An agenda-driven press, though, happily covers those films in great detail.  Hunter discusses the origins of some of pop culture’s environmentalist stars like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson and why they are really only qualified to speak about certain issues, but seem to be asked for what are portrayed as authoritative statements on a variety of things.  Hunter notes that if people can be incited to anger, they do what all people do when angry: make less-effective decisions, including asking for government policy that limits liberty and voting in politicians that want to expand government control.

The book was an interesting read.  The bias argument is an old one that is not always easily provable either way.  Hunter’s myriad examples were welcome additions to this argument.  The strong connection he made between the ineffectiveness of emotion-driven decision making and the push in the media to keep people worked up about something was well made.  In the last few years, the Right in America has started paying more attention to pop culture than in the past, and they are right to do so if they want to make inroads there.  Hunter’s analysis explains why this is so key.  While I appreciated so many concrete examples of movies, newspapers, and other works that bolstered the points Hunter was making, I was disappointed that the book was so laid-back in tone and even had a few of the lame jokes that both political sides make about the other.  Leaving that out and using the same pages and ink for a few more solid examples of Hollywood spending, editorial bias, or pseudo-science would have improved the book markedly and made it applicable to a wider audience.

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