What is grievance journalism and how do you know when you’ve encountered it?

It’s become common in recent years to hear someone announce momentously that they “no longer pay any attention to the news.”
Not due to lack of time or interest, but instead, for mental health reasons. “And I feel so much better!” they proclaim almost triumphantly, the relief palpable.
What’s caused so many to shift from seeing news as essential to being an informed citizen, to now perceiving it as somehow toxic and threatening to their basic sanity?
Questions like this are no longer the curiosity of journalism professors alone. They’re also shaping a new public health debate, thanks to books like Frank Bruni’s “The Age of Grievance” (2024), written after this columnist at The New York Times saw “how surprisingly and scarily angry so many Americans were.”
In the years prior, similar concerns were raised by religiously-oriented authors like Glenn Beck (“Addicted to Outrage,” 2017) and Arthur Brooks (”Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt,” 2019). But to hear this same urgency from Bruni, an openly gay columnist also on faculty at Duke University, demonstrates how thoroughly cross-partisan the concerns about America’s aggrieved atmosphere have become.
It’s in the political realm, of course, that appeals to outrage and grievance are most often heard. What sets apart “grievance politics,” according to scholars Matthew Flinders and Markus Hinterleitner in their 2022 article, “Party Politics vs. Grievance Politics,” is being “imbued with a fundamental sense of negative civic energy” (emphasis their own).
The past decade has also seen sustained debate at American universities over what some critics call “grievance studies,” referring to disciplines such as postcolonial theory, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, and intersectional feminism, which British author Helen Pluckrose argues begin “from the assumption of a grievance” and then bend “available theories to confirm it” — most often taking for granted that society is fundamentally a “system of power and privilege.”
It’s these kinds of trends that have prompted Jonathan Haidt to differentiate between a university committed to “truth,” and one committed to “social justice.” This same renowned professor also expressed concern in a 2022 Deseret News interview about the failure of “knowledge-centered institutions” such as universities and newspapers to “stand up for the (truth-seeking) mission of their institutions.”
Journalism has certainly experienced more intrusion from grievance, contempt and outrage over recent years, far beyond the well-known talk radio and cable news rhetoric (”they are trying to destroy America” … “they hate you”). Political scientist Alison Dagnes writes in a 2022 Oxford book about “grievance media,” wherein many news outlets have “exacerbated our partisan divisions as a means to attract a dedicated audience.”
This goes beyond the familiar bias of decidedly partisan news outlets (that selectively feature and frame stories to portray only one political party in a positive light), to a reliable attention-generating strategy across the spectrum of media outlets that taps into strong emotions of anger and fear.
It was three decades ago that professor David Protess and colleagues raised concern about the “journalism of outrage” already evident in investigative reporters willing to cross ethical lines in the 1990s.
In the time since, an outrage model has proven itself shockingly profitable. “On both the right and the left, grievance seems to be its own burgeoning economy,” Bruni writes. “To sell your wares as widely as possible, package them in grievance” — reflecting what professors Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj have called “the outrage industry.”
While agreeing this sensationalist approach has been “incredibly lucrative,” Dagnes cautions about all that it imposes on the public — including the inflamed passions and unsettled trust that arise “when political news organizations perform as activists.”
Something called “yellow journalism,” of course, has been around for a long time — a term first coined in the late 1880s to characterize slanted, scandalous, and often salacious stories published by New York upstart papers in a bid to compete with more established newspapers.
Even if this required assembling flimsy sources and sacrificing accuracy, these early papers led by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer became known for presenting stories in a way deliberately intended to inflame and provoke public passions (thereby attracting more attention and money).
Despite drawing oversized attention, this approach to reporting was long understood — and labeled — as a departure from quality norms of journalism, variously characterized as “exploitative … sensationalistic … tabloid.” The Scranton Tribune asked in 1898 how the American people could “read such trash in newspaper guise as is produced by Hearst, Pulitzer.”
Albeit more recognized in the past, it’s fair to say this same kind of intentionally provocative journalism has now become harder to spot and easier to overlook as it’s become a normal, even expected fixture of so much of modern news media.
In a recent interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, columnist Bruni goes deeper into “journalism in the age of grievance” — starting with pointing towards an earlier, more positive sense of the word. “The people fighting for civil rights had a grievance,” he says, “and thank God they did.”
By comparison, this New York Times commentator describes unhealthy grievance as “a complaint that has become overwrought” and existing “because someone is determined to complain” — ultimately which “demands a solution disproportionate to the problem.”
“We’re talking about anger that won’t be sated,” Bruni summarizes — something “that so enjoys itself, feeds on itself, and becomes a self-identity that it’s hard to see the far side of it.”
To his credit, Bruni has acknowledged his own past contributions to American resentments — even publicly apologizing in 2021 to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, for prior commentaries about him that compounded “the toxic tenor of American discourse, the furious pitch of American politics, the volume and vitriol of it all.”
In addition to provoking anger, there are at least five characteristics identified by Bruni and others that are useful in helping readers recognize when they are consuming news media contaminated by unhealthy grievance.
In a quick news cycle, Bruni says, it’s “easy or instinctual for news organizations to take out the same old playbook they’ve used a thousand times” — going through a set list in their evaluation of a political leader, for instance: “Let’s see what candidate A’s policies and personalities say about his or her potential impact on this marginalized community, or this interest group.”
“Now let’s do a story about what this other marginalized group or interest group thinks about this politician, and what we think his or her policies and messaging might mean for them.”
“We end up oversimplifying the world,” Bruni cautions, in a way that “exiles nuance” and instead “affirms and amplifies” a message of different interest groups locked in inescapable conflict with each other (while forgetting that “some of the most important issues transcend all groups,” he says, and “that we’re all Americans, ultimately in the same boat.”)
This kind of a framing “obviously is a grievance multiplier,” he argues — emphasizing in his book about how much an approach like this ”turbocharges conflict.”
Professor Joel Campbell at the BYU School of Communications remarks on reporting that advances a divisive image of religious communities, no matter what — even when an important new story emerges with natural appeal across divisions. To illustrate, he cites recent coverage of the BYU medical school announcement that in some cases highlighted socio-political debates that distracted from the “huge need for medical treatment in developing countries.”
“That’s the story!” he says.
“More and more Americans are convinced that they’re losing because somebody else is winning,” Bruni says — describing an increasingly common tendency among some to be “in thrall to their own persecution and intent on identifying the agents of it.”
“That sense of having been crazily wronged and deserving recompense” and needing “to name and vilify the people responsible,” he points out, “exists across the political spectrum.”
This is true even when the slights and offenses are minor enough to need some finessing. “More and more,” Americans “methodically tally their slights — some real, some imagined,” Bruni continues, “measur(ing) their misfortune, and assign(ing) particular people responsibility for it.”
In this kind of an atmosphere, the journalist adds, even “benign words are branded hurtful” and “benign gestures are deemed hostile.”
It appears many journalists are happy to join this grievance-tallying project and “indulging this habit of seeing the world in terms of who’s been slighted, how they’ve been slighted, what to do about that slight,” as Bruni puts it.
While right-leaning publications can effectively paint a provocative picture of religious conservatives being regularly insulted, dismissed and threatened by liberal politicians, professors, celebrities, etc., left-leaning outlets can also paint an equally ominous portrayal of minority groups in America regularly insulted, dismissed and threatened by conservative politicians, religious leaders, pro-family advocates, etc.
Where real differences exist in position, role or resources, a grievance lens automatically sees this as a bad sign — undoubtedly reflecting some kind of inequality, inequity and structural oppression.
Observable differences are taken for granted through this lens as a sign of something deeply amiss. Campbell describes the existence of “a lot of money,” for instance, as something automatically seen with suspicion — “that’s bad.”
Such reporting shows little curiosity about questions such as: What is it that makes a large sum of money inherently problematic? What if that money is funding efforts to feed Africa, cure cancer or provide emotional strength to others? Is government, because of its size, inherently bad and worthy of grievance, even when something positive may result from its efforts?
Author Dan Ellsworth writes of an “epistemology of accusation,” which is “the idea that saying bad things about people and institutions is the best way to arrive at the truth.”
“As soon as you think someone’s the bad guy,” journalist Nina-Sophia Miralles told the Deseret News, you stop asking real questions to learn more — “you don’t want to know anything about them.”
But if a journalist can pose meaningful questions about an unfamiliar group in their reporting, like this British journalist did in her own feature piece on Latter-day Saints, readers are encouraged to dig deeper. “The next time somebody mentions something about a particular group that hate doesn’t rise in you,” she adds. “Anything that you can do to calm people down a little bit is probably a public service.”
Grievance journalism tends to frame challenging situations as signaling a deliberate intent to harm, rather than seeing people as doing the best they can with complicated matters. For instance, Bruni recounts the national shortage of baby formula, when photos of pallets of powdered milk caught the attention of broadcaster Sean Hannity. With outrage, this Fox News pundit mistakenly told viewers that the photo represented “pallets and pallets of baby formula for illegal immigrants and their families.”
Viewers were no doubt shocked to be discovering another “betrayal of law-abiding citizens” and an “insidious plot,” Bruni writes — thanks to a broadcaster who had, in the words of CNN commentator Alex Koppelman, turned the “thinnest possible set of facts into days of outrage.”
There are certainly plenty of examples of left-leaning outlets likewise implying a conscious intent to harm on the right. In an article entitled, “Donald Trump’s Plot Against America” journalist Marc Elias wrote in late 2023, “Donald Trump is plotting to overthrow American democracy. It is not a secret, and he is not subtle. The only question is whether enough people will care enough to stop it.”
It’s common to see other prominent articles that severely question motives, such as this recent MSNBC headline: “Elon Musk is not well intentioned when it comes to U.S. liberal democracy.”
Journalist Mike Pesca writes about the problem with what he calls “conclusion-first journalism” — which parallels concerns by Heather Heying about scholarship “extolling activism over inquiry” and by Helen Pluckrose and colleagues that “only certain conclusions are allowed” in parts of the academy that tend to “put social grievances ahead of objective truth.”
By way of example, professor Campbell points to an NPR radio story from early 2023 which interviewed a group of women who were disaffected from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in different ways, but held up as representing some kind of norm among female members.
“Not one single voice in that radio program,” he says, “reflected a “run-of-the-mill, regularly-attending Latter-day Saint woman.” As a result, he suggests, the listeners ultimately missed what most Latter-day Saint women were thinking.
The Global Faith and Entertainment Study conducted by HarrisX and Bonneville Communications (a sister company to Deseret News) surveyed more than 10,000 people across all major world religions. Majorities of believers across diverse faith communities said that entertainment similarly “perpetuates religious stereotypes” and tends to “follow the same storyline over and over.”
This kind of distortion is disappointing enough in entertainment media, with the Church of Jesus Christ just this week raising concern about an increasing number of “gross misrepresentations” in the entertainment industry that “rely on sensationalism and inaccuracies that do not fairly and fully reflect the lives of our Church members or the sacred beliefs that they hold dear” and which “depict lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the Church.”
By contrast, one would hope that journalists get it right more often. Yet acknowledging that mainstream journalists may not have “a lot of background in faith,” Campbell says reporters can sometimes come to stories about religion with more “contempt” than “curiosity.”
That can lead to faith headlines that are intentionally edgy, and which lean into raw nerves culturally that are well known to inflame lingering resentments. Even when people of faith are simply trying to share their beliefs in family or traditional values, like a recent speech from Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, this can be further “distorted in order to invoke outrage.”
Yet again, it’s sometimes the questions that aren’t asked and the voices that simply get left out, where stories drift from reality. “All too often, if a set of events on the surface has a political moral that we like, or seems to be telling a story that is our preferred story,” Bruni says, “we don’t muster or apply scrutiny” — suggesting that journalists need to be more “careful that you’re not traveling far away from the truth.”
Campbell recounts becoming aware of a journalist working on a story about students of color at BYU. Sensing that the reporter had already concluded the university was “treating minorities poorly and doing nothing,” this communications professor went out of his way to provide the reporter with a number of positive examples of race relations on campus.
“Not a word of it makes it into the story.”
The solutions to much of this are hardly out of reach. Campbell, Bruni and others remind readers that many of the answers lie in returning to basic journalistic ethics — starting with the call to “seek truth and report it” in a manner that is “accurate and fair.” That means making sure a “preconceived notion” about any group, issue or person, Campbell says, does not get added “on top of the story presumably being investigated.”
After finishing his in-depth look at America’s “age of grievance,” Bruni recalls realizing that “almost everything I looked at, from a certain angle, was a crisis of humility.” In addition to examples in news media, that was evident in political leaders who weren’t “respecting the diversity of opinion that exists in any population” and it showed up in citizens eager to cancel others without remembering their own “worst moments” they are “lucky” to not have been condemned for.
“Humility is the antidote to grievance because it recognizes that the world doesn’t conform perfectly to any one person’s desires,” he says. Bruni tells his journalism students at Duke that, more than anything else, they will hear him say “it’s complicated” — a phrase, he writes, that serves as a “bulwark against arrogance, absolutism, purity, zeal.”
“There is much in this life, and in this society, that is objectively right or objectively wrong,” he acknowledges. But on any given issue, there are also “so many question marks, there are so many guesses.”