Thinking of “culture war” as a mere accident of market incentives hides the deliberate class warfare inherent in neoliberalism.
Unfortunately, this appears to be the trap that many commentators who are sharing a new Harvard job market paper, The Business of the Culture War by Aakaash Rao and Shakked Noy have fallen into.
The paper presents “two novel facts”:
- Classification of US politicians’ TV ads since 1960 that shows cable news ads focus on “cultural conflict” compared to free-to-air ads that focus on “healthcare, taxes, jobs, and social insurance”.
- Using topic classifications, the issues disproportionately emphasised by cable news have seen “the largest growth in the extent to which they divide Democratic and Republican voters and in the number of people naming them the “most important problem” facing the country”.
The paper, and the commentary attached to it, argues for a causal chain:
Technology (cable TV) ➞ Incentives (profit) ➞ Content (culture war) ➞ Voter polarisation (attention)
Here is the smoking gun! The empirical evidence that the culture wars are driven by profit-seeking cable news conglomerates.
From a progressive perspective, this is an attractive argument. The paper seems to show how dissent is commodified by the major media companies, who turn politics into consumer entertainment, simultaneously enriching the media monopolies through ad revenue and displacing economic conflict with identity conflict, protecting the neoliberal economic consensus from scrutiny. The article exposes the “revealed preferences” of decades of viewing habits to prove that audiences demand, and cable news provides, culture war and outrage content as entertainment.
The need to be outraged by political correctness, immigrants, a drag queen or a cancelled book, to distract from the “real need” for liberation from economic exploitation. Fox News and MSNBC turn the citizen into a passive consumer of outrage. The “Fourth Estate” does not hold power to account; it maximises shareholder value by agitating the public to sell ads.
According to this paper, cable news alone accounts for one-third of the rise in cultural polarisation in the USA.
While sounding empirical regarding the causal mechanism, and while it is undeniable that exposure to extreme media worsens polarisation, it mistakes the symptom for the disease.
The paper argues economic news is boring. It fails to ask why. The neoliberal consensus that has dominated most Western politics since the 1980s removed most genuine economic debate from the table. If Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Tories, Labor and Liberal all agree on the fundamentals of capitalism, economic news becomes mere technical management.
The “culture war” didn’t replace economic politics. The decline of economic politics caused by the neoliberal consensus created a vacuum that the Culture War filled.
The paper also uses a Large Language Model to classify the vast amount of data it draws on. This is treated as an objective scientific instrument, but LLMs are highly and structurally biased by their training data.
By training an AI (by two “former political staffers”, then “several workers from Upwork”!) to accept that immigration is a cultural issue rather than a labour market/wage issue, or that crime is cultural issue rather than a result of material deprivation, the study smuggles in a neoliberal worldview before the analysis even begins.
This is circular logic. It doesn’t prove immigration is inherently cultural; it proves that 40 years of neoliberal media have successfully trained American audiences (and Upwork workers, and political staffers) to react to immigration as a culture war spectacle rather than an economic issue.
There is no distinct cultural sphere separate from the economic sphere. Cultural issues are expressions of material conflicts. Separating them via a “neutral” algorithm sanitises the political economy, turning class struggles into false identity disputes.
The paper also says that cable news is financially mobilised to maximise viewer attention. The empirical conclusion is that “cultural content is more effective than economic content at attracting viewers” who would otherwise watch non-news entertainment.
The conclusion: economic news causes viewers to tune out because it is inherently “boring,” while culture war content is “engaging”.
However, economics is not boring. The media chooses to present economics as a series of stock tickers, GDP floats, and interest rate adjustments. Language designed for the asset-owning class, not everyday people.
When cable news covers economics as class war — corporate price-gouging, wage theft, the looting of the public purse by private contractors — it is both highly engaging and relevant to peoples’ material lives. The article’s own data even finds that “anti-elite” content is highly engaging — it’s not hard to see how this could be an economic category instead of a cultural one. Viewers aren’t turned off by inequality. They are turned off by the technocratic, depoliticised “administration” of the economy.
The decision to present economics as dry “administration” is a political choice to depoliticise viewers, ensuring everyday people remains disengaged from the underlying economic mechanisms that exploit them.
The paper also presents media companies as simply audience “size-maximisers” looking for ad revenue. This treats Fox News or MSNBC as if they were mechanically selling a commodity, ignoring that they are owned by oligarchs with specific class interests. The US cable news networks are owned by individual billionaires or financialised asset companies whose primary purpose for owning media companies is to manufacture consent.
The distraction of the culture war is not an accidental by-product of seeking ratings to sell ads. It is a strategic necessity for neoliberal, rentier capitalism. If the media focused on the reality of wealth transfer — how billionaires extract the wealth of everyday people through housing, health, water and electricity, toll roads, junk credit card fees, etc — it would endanger the existence of the billionaires who own the media outlets.
Papers and analysis like this are interesting, but fundamentally invert the real cause and effect. By focusing on the business of the culture war, the authors ignore the politics of the culture war. Here’s my alternative causal chain:
Neoliberalism (inequality) ➞ Class antagonism ➞ Media/political strategy to divert this antagonism into “culture war” ➞ System preservation
Despite my criticisms of this paper, it is an interesting look at how cable news and exposure to news reporting impacts on the politics.
Under neoliberalism, the economy is something done to workers, not by them. It can be depressing and disempowering, and this feeling is weaponised by the far-right who use the “pseudo-activity” of culture wars to create a false sense of agency.
However, it was not the invisible hand of the cable news networks that polarised the US. It was the inequality driven by neoliberalism.