NPR Helps MSNBC's Chris Hayes Trash Trump, 'Attention Capitalism'

February 2nd, 2025 8:30 AM

NPR doesn't exist to promote books by Fox News hosts, but they're an easy mark for MSNBC personalities. Rachel Maddow has counted on it. On January 27, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep awarded seven minutes to All In host Chris Hayes to promote his new book The Sirens' Call, mourning "the assault of attention capitalism."

The favorable New York Times book review called it "An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only ourselves but also our politics." Degraded by Donald Trump, that is.

Hayes, they asserted, argues "this particular stage of capitalism is fueled by a fracking of our minds. It’s not as if Trump is keen to regulate any extraction industry, let alone the one that helped bring him to the White House."

INSKEEP: I'm thinking about Trump's media and political strategy and how it fits with some of the things that you write. You point out that it is easier to get someone's attention for a moment than it is to hold someone's attention, and Trump doesn't necessarily try to hold your attention. He gets it [Hayes laughs] over and over again. Just since the election, let's take over Greenland. How about the Panama Canal? Canada. Let's rename Mount McKinley. We've gone on and on. Always there's a new thing to get our attention again.

HAYES: This is exactly right. In fact, when he tries to hold attention - famously, when he goes for 90 minutes at a rally -- people leave.

INSKEEP: Yep.

HAYES: He's actually not good at holding attention. And this is a central dynamic of the attention age. It's replicated in the slot-machine design of the algorithmic feed, where you just grab, grab, grab, grab, grab. You never hold attention. Everything's short. You go to the next one. Trump has the exact same -- you're totally right -- has the exact same approach to this. And that's because interruption and compelled attention are the circuitry that is easiest to fire in us.

Inskeep only "balanced" this by noting MSNBC's ratings. "The impression from the outside is that MSNBC is struggling to hold people's attention. Do you see it that way?"

Hayes sounded optimistic that the Resistance would soon spring back into action:  I feel like there is a kind of pressing down of a spring happening in our politics amongst what I would call the almost 50% of the country that voted against Donald Trump, or the smaller percentage that deeply, deeply dislikes him and think he's bad for the country. And I can feel that spring being pushed down and pushed down and pushed down. And it's now out of view, but I don't think it's going to stay out of view."