Inflammatory Media

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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June 30, 2026

Inflammatory media are traditional and social media outlets that make conflict worse because anger is profitable. Some do this deliberately. Others drift into it because the business model rewards whatever gets attention. Outrage attracts viewers, listeners, clicks, shares, subscriptions, donations, and advertising revenue.

This does not mean that all strong criticism is meant to be inflammatory, or that journalists should avoid disturbing facts. Good journalism often exposes wrongdoing and gives voice to people who have been hurt and/or ignored. The problem arises when media outlets frame public life as permanent combat. When they exaggerate threats, encourage contempt, or make opponents seem so dangerous that ordinary democratic bargaining appears naïve or immoral, we would call that "inflammatory media," and hence bad for democracy and for a healthy society.

This problem is not limited to one medium. Cable news, talk radio, podcasts, partisan websites, Substack newsletters, YouTube channels, TikTok accounts, and X feeds can all build audiences by intensifying conflict. But social media adds a special danger because users do not simply choose what to read. Platform algorithms help decide what becomes visible. A 2025 study on engagement-based ranking found that such systems often amplify emotionally charged and out-group-hostile political content. Other research has found that posts attacking political opponents are more likely to be shared, as shown in the PNAS study on out-group animosity. In short, media systems often reward the very material that makes constructive conflict harder.

Inflammatory media also distort how people understand their opponents. Instead of showing the range of views that exists within a community, it often highlights the most extreme or offensive examples. This encourages people to believe that the other side is more hateful, more foolish, and more dangerous than it really is. The result is a positive feedback loop: citizens become angrier, media producers give them more anger-producing material, and political leaders learn that outrage gets coverage. Research on moral-emotional language and online diffusion helps explain why emotionally charged political messages spread so easily. The MIT study on the spread of true and false news online likewise found that false news traveled more rapidly and broadly than true news on Twitter, especially in politics.

The rise of news influencers makes this even harder to manage. Pew Research Center reported that about one in five U.S. adults regularly get news from social media influencers, with a much higher share among adults under 30. Some influencers do careful explanatory work. Others operate without the norms that professional journalism has traditionally tried to uphold, such as fact-checking, corrections, source verification, and separation between reporting and advocacy. Meanwhile, the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found that traditional news organizations in many countries are struggling with low trust and weak engagement. This creates an opening for more personal, more emotional, and often less accountable forms of political media.

The democratic cost is substantial. Inflammatory media makes it harder for citizens to identify shared problems, harder for leaders to compromise, and harder for communities to distinguish real threats from manufactured panic. It weakens the social trust on which constructive conflict depends. It also helps bad-faith actors prevail, because they can use media attention as a weapon: provoke outrage, dominate the agenda, and force everyone else to respond.

The remedy is not censorship, nor is it a demand that media avoid conflict. The remedy is a healthier information ecosystem. That includes stronger professional journalism, transparent platform design, media literacy, support for local news, and civic norms that reward accuracy over provocation. Citizens can help by refusing to share material designed mainly to inflame, by checking sources before reacting, and by supporting media that helps people understand problems, rather than simply teaching them whom to hate.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.