The Modern Media Machine: How Competition and Sensationalism Have Transformed Political Impact
Today, the rapid flow of news and social media has inundated mass populations with mass media.
As of April 2025, 68.7% of the world’s population has access to the internet, and it’s boundless. Quickly, that access is being manipulated as a strategy to impact public perception of both events and individuals.
Although it seems like it, extremist media, and exaggerated headlines are nothing new: in 1898, the USS Maine sank in Havana harbor. The incident quickly evolved into the first prominent onset of Yellow Journalism in the midst of tragedy within the United States. Yellow journalism of the time, a style which is purely known for its emphasis on “sensationalism over facts” ends up prompting the Spanish-American War. But since then, the spread of media that we absorb through our cell phones, laptops, and advertisements have globalized and become more accessible.
Just as coverage of the USS Maine in Havana sparked anti-Spanish sentiment nearly 130 years ago, the news still raises controversy behind today’s conflicts and the voices of activists and politicians are broadcasted more widely than ever before.
So what’s changed? What makes the coverage of events today so very different from yellow journalism?
Today, the news has even more power to shape the public’s opinion on our biggest concerns – Israel and Gaza. Ukraine and Russia. Nuclear war. Climate change. Immigration.
That’s because more people have access to the internet, and the world is becoming even more interconnected. In 2022, the US exported nearly 2.1 billion US dollars to 222 countries across the globe. We all have connections to each other, across political boundaries, which is what makes the weight of global news so much more significant than it was in the late 1800’s; and it makes it easier to manipulate truth through social media.
As the news has become more important to shaping broader public opinion, media strategist positions have emerged within political and social campaigns. These strategists have worked to harness the news system that still has origins in the days of yellow journalism: ripe with competition, volume, and sensationalist portrayals of tragedy.
Ted Turner established CNN as the first 24-hour televised news station in 1980. The system, which required a constant flow of information, pioneered a news cycle that “thrives off of people tuning in for destruction,” specifically due to the program’s origin during the Gulf War. Film from the war, which was broadcasted constantly, invested Americans in affairs overseas. Those broadcasts by CNN were so successful that they became a major contributing factor as to why CNN is a leading news organization today.
Other companies, like Fox, saw this success in constant broadcasting, and they chose to harness it themselves, establishing their own 24-hour program.
As audiences have gained more options regarding where to get their news (like the choice between CNN versus Fox), competition emerges. All companies want the greatest profit from their broadcasting, and the greatest amount of viewers. The primary way to achieve this is to have leading access to the most dramatic events. And because every story needs to get out quick, before every other competitors take, good journalism– good pressure on power – loses its essential deep thought and commentary.
When competing companies enter the market, they tend to diversify their political stances in order to attract different demographics. This reinforces what’s called the ‘echo chamber effect,’ where individuals choose news sites that provide validation for their original view. For instance, democrats will often choose left-leaning media and republicans will often choose more right-leaning sources to reinforce their own perspectives on events. That prevalence of the echo-chamber effect is yet another barrier to successful discourse between groups, and a contributor to the fall of that very same ‘good pressure on power’ we lose in extreme journalistic competition.
All these traits, competition and echo-chambers, carry down to what we view as the most prominent media today: social media, whether it’s X, Instagram, or Facebook. Every evolution of media has resulted in an increased volume of news, and an exponential increase occurs in the shift between 24-hour broadcasting and social media. More is covered in the news, and what is covered is becoming accessible for increasing amounts of people.
It seems as though this knowledge would create a more understanding and empathetic public. Instead, the pure volume of news makes us numb and callus to the most devastating things. Instead of taking them in, absorbing them, we scroll past to the next outrage.
We feel as though we’re consuming all of it, taking in everything, when really we’re just skimming the surface of headlines. Filtering them in. Filtering them out.
Those same headlines we read demonstrate ‘cognitive shortcuts’ that allow us to discount events leading up to, and following, tragedy.
The modern prevalence of headlines has reduced total event processing of readers dramatically. When coverage is limited to a bold sentence at the top of a page, we lose a great amount of our sympathy for individuals affected. We prefer to read only snippets of the flashiest stories. And we lose our ability to process events, lose the ability to critically question what we are reading about and why we’re reading it.
That’s where political strategy comes in.
Steve Bannon, President Trump’s first Chief White House strategist (from 2016-2017), is credited with the administration’s approach to rapid news and the overwhelming pace within which tasks are carried out.
Bannon’s strategy? To “flood the zone”, and overwhelm the opposition with a constant flow of outrage so that they “will never be able to recover.”
This phenomenon is also known as ‘Muzzle velocity.’ Ezra Klein simplifies this. Muzzle velocity, in his words, is when “you’re always consumed by the next outrage, [so] you can’t look closely at the last one.”
When Steve Bannon, President Trump, and other administrations give demographics of the public so many things to be angry about, it’s difficult to examine and fully grasp events. When we’re focused on the most recent things, we can’t take a second to stop.
We can’t read more than a headline – because there are simply too many to focus on.
The modern media machine has dictated the development of public opinion and events since the onset of Yellow Journalism in the late 1890’s. But as more and more people gain access to the internet, to the media, they are left to question whether it really needs so much power.
They are left to decide whether or not media strategy is synonymous with manipulation, and they get to choose whether or not they read more than a headline.
The modern media user is left to simultaneously recognize the fundamental flaws of the news system, while still keeping themselves informed.
And as the news continues to evolve, from those written newspapers to social media to beyond, we must ask when it will become too much. Or, we must ask if that’s a threshold we’ve already crossed.
References
Bannon, Steve. “Zero Tolerance: Steve Bannon Interview | FRONTLINE.” PBS, interview by Michael Kirk, 17 Mar. 2019, www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/steve-bannon-2/
Broadwater, Luke. “Trump’s ‘Flood the Zone’ Strategy Leaves Opponents Gasping in Outrage.” Nytimes.com, The New York Times, 28 Jan. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/us/politics/trump-policy-blitz.html
DataReportal. “Digital around the World.” DataReportal, Kepios, Apr. 2025, datareportal.com/global-digital-overview
GCFGlobal. “Digital Media Literacy: What Is an Echo Chamber?” GCF Global, 2019, edu.gcfglobal.org/en/digital-media-literacy/what-is-an-echo-chamber/1/
Gibson, TJ. “How the 24-Hour News Cycle Ruined Journalism.” The Heritage Herald, 6 Mar. 2025, heritageherald.com/2025/03/06/how-the-24-hour-news-cycle-ruined-journalism
Klein, Ezra. “Don’t Believe Him.” The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, 2 February 2025. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-trump-column-read.html
Office of the Historian. “U.S. Diplomacy and Yellow Journalism, 1895–1898.” History.state.gov, US Department of State, 2019, history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/yellow-journalism
Scacco, Joshua, and Ashley Muddiman. “The Current State of News Headlines – Center for Media Engagement – Center for Media Engagement.” Mediaengagement.org, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 Dec. 2015, mediaengagement.org/research/the-current-state-of-news-headlines/.
World Integrated Trade Solution. “United States Exports by Country and Region 2022 | WITS Data.” Worldbank.org, 2022, wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/USA/Year/2022/TradeFlow/Export/Partner/all Accessed 11 May 2025.