I saw some statistics today about the use of certain phrases in the New York Times.
Woke terms and concepts such as “patriarchy,” “mansplaining,” “Islamophobia,” and “toxic masculinity.”
The trend is best illustrated by the term “racism,” which has been in widespread use for much longer than the others.
Various NYT articles referenced racism at a fairly even clip throughout the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and up to the early 2010s.
And then, there was a sharp spike.
So for comparison, in 2010, there were on average 5-6 articles in the NYT each day that mentioned racism.
Since 2016, it’s been more like 20-30.
What explains this explosion?
Well, there’s a conspiracy theory floating around that’s straight out of the 70s movie Network.
It says that the rich got nervous about all the attention being given to economic disparities in US society (remember Occupy Wall Street?). So godlike business magnates called in their big-media lackeys, and they said,
“Why do we pay you? So you can report on the growing revolt of the hundreds of millions of poor people in this country? No! Do something else and do it now. Focus on the blacks or the gays or the Mexicans, but not the poor!”
So there’s that explanation. And then there’s the much more bland non-conspiracy theory:
Throughout the 2000s, the print circulation of the NYT was steadily dropping.
At the same time, the newspaper was moving more of its content online.
But unlike a bunch of sheets of paper, a website will happily speak up and tell you what people read and what they respond to.
And just like with Faye Dunaway’s character in Network, it probably took only one intelligent, ambitious, and ruthless editor to take this information and conclude, “Give the people what they want! Give them polarizing stories. Reinforce their already-held beliefs. That’s how we’ll quadruple our digital subscribers.”
Whichever theory is true, I think there are lots of lessons here for you if you’re doing any kind of marketing online.
Particularly if you’re in anything resembling a mass or commodity market. Which is what I’ve been doing a lot of lately. And if you want my insights on how to write polarizing copy that quadruples your mass-market buyers, you might like the following: