What online porn can teach us about ourselves

"Who we are" versus "who we want to be"

I recently got an email that made me think.

Here it is:

“I've subscribed since you started, but am not now a paid subscriber. I am a bit distressed that your focus seems awfully focused on the ‘horse race’ aspect of politics, rather than the policy consequences of elections. How do you respond to such a criticism.”

This is not a new critique — of either me in particular or journalism more broadly. Ask any Democrat (and, yes, it’s almost always Democrats) what the press does wrong and they will respond with something like: The media is obsessed with the horse race. Polling. Personalities. Strategies. I just want to know where the candidates stand on the ISSUES.

That view is perhaps best — or, at least, most concisely — summed up by media critic and New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen with his mantra “not the odds, but the stakes.”

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The idea underpinning this criticism is that the media is, at root, a public service. And that it is not doing its job of educating voters about what’s really at stake in the election. The best way to do that is to do deep reporting on where candidates stand on the issues and avoid coverage of who’s up and who’s down.

I have spent a very long time thinking about this very question/critique. I believe it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of who we are — and what we really, deep down, want.

To explain, I turn to the world of online pornography. (Just stick with me!)

While hard and fast data is not readily available, most industry experts believe that online porn is a billion-dollar operation. (Many people say that number is much, much higher.)

“The safe estimate is to say it’s worth billions, but I don’t know exactly how many billion, and no one does,” Dan Miller, the managing editor of AVN, a publication that covers porn, told Quartz in 2018.

Ok, so let’s say, very conservatively, that online porn is a $1 billion business.

Now, let’s also say, I am giving a talk in front of 100 people. And as an icebreaker (this would be a weird icebreaker admittedly), I ask people to raise their hands if they love online porn.

Chances are no one would raise their hand, right? And if someone did, well, that would be super awkward for him (or her).

Which reveals a deep disconnect: Porn is a $1 billion industry (at least). And yet, no one will publicly admit that they ever look at it. But someone is looking at it! It’s making a billion a year!

This is an illustration, it seems to me, of the gap between who we want to be and who we are.

Who we want to be is someone who would never, ever look at pornography online. Who we are is, well, porn is a billion-dollar industry.

At this point you are likely wondering: What the hell does any of this have to do with horse race journalism???

Good question! And I will tell you.

What people say they want — or at least Democrats/liberals say they want — is journalism that dives deeply into the issues.

But, time after time in my journalism career, which now spans, sigh, 3 decades, I have seen that what people say they want and what they actually read (or at least click on) is vastly different.

(Sidebar: Everyone needs to read “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Incredible book on this very subject.)

One example: Climate change is, without debate, an issue that poses an existential threat to our world. Without collective action — globally — we are headed to a very bad place.

Newsrooms, over the past decade, have responded to that threat. CNN, for example, launched an entire global climate team in 2021. Other media organizations have followed suit.

And yet, at least in my time at the Washington Post and CNN, climate change stories — many of which were incredibly richly reported and beautifully displayed online — generated, at best, modest web traffic.

Know what did bonkers web traffic? Stories about Marjorie Taylor Greene. I should know! I wrote lots of them!

I wrote these pieces because I thought they were, generally speaking, interesting. But, if I am being honest, I also wrote them because I KNEW they would perform well in terms of web traffic. (At the time, I thought my ability to get lots of page views would ensure I would always have job security. Whoops!)

None of those MTG stories took me more than three hours to report and write. All of them performed really well. Much better than, say, the average story on climate change, which, usually, took a lot more than 3 hours to report and write.

Which is revealing — about who we are and what we really want to read about.

It’s not just my days at CNN and WaPo that are instructive either. Know the most popular Substack post — in terms of traffic — I wrote in 2023? This one:

Not exactly a deep dive into a crucial issue that will shape America’s place in the world for future generations…

The counter argument to all of this is, I suppose, that if we just gave people MORE policy coverage, MORE issues stuff, they would, eventually, eat it up. That the issue with the low traffic to these sorts of stories (and, again, I am speaking in generalities — I am sure there are some very long policy-focused stories that have performed well) is that there aren’t enough of them.

I am….skeptical of that argument. Every mainstream media outlet churns out TONS and TONS of policy stories. (They write more horse-race stories, yes.) And, again generally speaking, the audience is simply not there. Or not there in anywhere the numbers that they are for, say, MTG and Lauren Boebert fighting. Or Joe Biden blaming his staff for his bad debate performance. Or Donald Trump farting.

The other other argument I often hear is that it doesn’t matter what the public wants. Journalism (and journalists) need to educate the public. That’s their job. It’s a public service industry.

Which it is — sort of. Journalism is, I believe, a public service. Without a free and independent media, bad things, historically speaking, happen to societies.

But it isn’t just a public service. It’s a business too. And a very bad business — as the slew of layoffs (mine included) over the past few years at mainstream media outlets have shown.

Which means that journalism done right has to be a balance.

You can’t only give people the stories they want. And so, I don’t write about MTG all that much. Because I think she isn’t terribly relevant right now.

But you also can’t ignore what people they are telling you they want — by the pieces they click on — either. To do so would be to dismiss the wants of the customer — a major no-no in business.

Washington Post publisher Will Lewis was excoriated earlier this summer when he delivered this blunt message to the staff:

“We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

Here’s the thing: I think he’s totally right.

And what’s even more amazing is that, generally speaking, we know what people want. Not what they say they want. What they really want.

They want stories about personalities. About people. About conflict. About disagreement. About fights.

This is true outside of political journalism too. There’s a reason that there are 30 iterations of “Real Housewives.” And why online porn is a billion-dollar business.

We all want to be the person reading Thomas Piketty and taking those river cruises they offer on PBS. Who watch obscure French films about ennui. Who dig deep into what candidates say about an issue — to really understand where they’re coming from.

But who we are is very different. We flock to the theater to watch “Deadpool & Wolverine.” We watch professional wrestling even though we know it’s fake. And we often make our minds up on who to vote for based on very superficial and subjective measures — like whether they are attractive. Or whether they are “cool.”

I aim — as I mentioned above — to scratch both itches with this Substack.

I write about the horse race because a) it interests me and b) deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, it interests you too. I also try to add context, analysis and, yes, a few laughs along the way.

I try NOT to write about MTG every day or every week or even every month — unless she is actually relevant to what is happening in politics at the moment. I don’t just bash Trump. I don’t just bash Biden (or Harris). If I did, I would have more subscribers — but that’s not me!

Here’s the truth: No matter what we tell ourselves, the data (and the web traffic and the book sales and the cable ratings and all the rest) don’t lie.

We like the drama. We like the personalities. We like the horse race. We like dessert before dinner. Or maybe even instead of dinner.