Whose Fake Outrage Are We Faking Being Outraged About Today?

Last night, during the annual
televised Department of the Interior round-up and execution of wild
horses (which took place in New Jersey this year for some odd
reason), Coca-Cola premiered a new commercial that included: 1)
part of “America the Beautiful” being sung in a language other than
English; and 2) a family with two dads.

People being outraged about everything under the sun has been a
theme on Twitter for a while. Media outlets hunting down the
outrage and publicizing it as a relatively cheap way to score hits
from people who like to be outraged about the outrage of other
people followed not long after. For the Coca-Cola commercial,
reaction tweets were posted at
USA Today,
E! Online, the
Daily Mail,
Talking Points Memo,
Mediaite, and likely others.

In each case, a handful of tweets are intended to serve as
evidence as some sort of widespread attitude among a certain
demographic, which will then subsequently be used to judge a much
larger group of people. Thus, we had the infamous
MSNBC Cheerios tweet that assumed right-wingers would hate an
advertisement that featured a biracial family.

But is there any substantive evidence that this outrage actually
existed to a degree large enough to justify multiple media reports?
It certainly doesn’t seem like it, but man, aren’t those easy
stories to put together? Toss a few search terms on Twitter and you
can find all sorts of opinions! Reporters can put together “man on
the street” stories without ever even leaving their desks or
actually interacting with any other human beings at all!

“Man on the Street” pieces were never all that interesting or
useful to begin with, but at least it involved an actual person in
an actual place who chose to share his or her opinions to a
reporter for our evaluation. This nearly contextless sharing of
random angry tweets illuminates even less. But it’s good for
stirring up a round of counteroutrage, isn’t it? And that
counteroutrage at some anonymous, undefined number of people
behaving badly on the Internet makes some others feel more
superior, doesn’t it?

Below, the ad:

I am outraged by how utterly pedestrian it is. This could have
been a Levi’s ad five years ago. It could be advertising
anything.