At Quillette, Canadian writer George Case reflects on the change in media that coined the word:

What is angertainment? Strictly speaking, it isn’t news per se, insofar as there are still any sources striving to deliver neutral coverage of objective facts. Some stories may very well make news consumers angry—“Bombing kills hundreds,” “Government cuts announced,” “Unemployment rises”—but they aren’t specifically produced to incite outrage, beyond the journalistic “If it bleeds, it leads” imperative. While sports coverage and statistics preoccupy a lot of people, they generally stimulate responses besides anger, except over fumbled plays or bad calls. And entertainment in the form of movies, streaming series, and even music and video games certainly engages our emotions, but it mostly serves as an outlet for them rather than to goad us: we may hiss at a cinematic villain, be moved by a protest ballad, or bang our heads to a heavy-metal anthem, but the feelings dissipate once the film or the song concludes.

“Rage Is Now the Machine,” September 24, 2025

So what’s changed?

The advent of 24-hour channels like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC (and comparable networks in other countries), first on cable and then online, was when the angertainment trend became a permanent and identifiable fixture of programming. To fill unending schedules with sponsored content, reporting on the latest newsworthy events could only take up so much time; the rest of their feeds were devoted to interviews, opinion, and “analysis,” all seamlessly spliced with traditional on-the-ground dispatches. Executives who studied the numbers discovered that viewers stayed for the filler. After all, you only needed to hear about a plane crash or an election result once, but discussion of their significance could be spun out indefinitely. And if the significance could be interpreted differently by different observers—or if the differing interpretations were somehow turned into news in their own right—the fireworks that resulted could be a ratings bonanza. “Now the Machine”

Of course, addiction to online rage is a choice and so is recovery. It might be helpful to keep in mind that, as so often, George Orwell (1903–1950) predicted this. In 1984, the government imposed a daily Two Minute Hate:

Let’s not be those people.