America Is Not Polarized. America Is Afraid — And Fear Is Being Monetized.

Someone is getting paid every time you are afraid.

The cable news industry generates over seven billion dollars annually. The global attention economy generates over six hundred billion. The product driving those numbers is not information. It is your anxiety. And three systems — cable news, political fundraising, and social media algorithms — are profiting from both sides of the political divide simultaneously.

In this episode, Keith D. Terry argues that America is not polarized. America is afraid. Drawing on research from MIT, Gallup, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the American Psychological Association, Keith builds the full architecture of the fear economy — and delivers a three-part framework for reclaiming clarity as a leader.

Fear does not stay on the screen. It walks into the boardroom.

This episode will show you how to opt out.

leadership, fear economy, media bias, political polarization, executive leadership, decision making, faith and business, attention economy

Transcript

America Is Afraid Not Polarized

Keith D. Terry 0:00

America is not polarized. America is afraid. And the fear has been so effectively monetized that it now feels like polarization. Welcome to the podcast, The Next Big Thing. I'm your host, Keith D.Terry, a consultant, a coach, and a serial entrepreneur. The mission here is to teach, inspire. Fear is the most profitable product ever sold in American media. And we keep buying it every click, every share, every argument at a family dinner that ends with someone leaving the table, every sleepless night spent scrolling through the headlines that were designed and engineered in a laboratory to produce exactly the response in exactly your nervous system. Someone is getting paid every time you're afraid. A university research team at MIT analyzed five years of social media engagement data and found that post-triggering anger or fear generates six times more interaction than neutral or positive content. Six times. That is not an accident. That formula has a business plan behind it, a distribution network attached to it, and a profit margin embedded in it. The U.S. cable news industry generates over $7 billion in annual revenue, $7 billion. And the editorial product that drives that revenue is not information. It is anxiety. It is the feeling that the world is on fire, that your side is losing, that you need to stay tuned in for the next update because something worse is about to happen. Globally, the attention economy, meaning the entire architecture of social media, streaming platforms, and digital content designed to capture and hold our focus, generates over $600 billion annually. The core monetization mechanism is not content, it's an emotional activation. And fear and outrage are the highest performing triggers in the entire system. Here's what I need you to hear before anything else. Your fear is not a reaction to the world. Your fear is a transaction. You are the product, and it's time to opt out. Today I'm saying an uncomfortable thing. I want to be precise about what this episode is and what this episode is not. This is not a political episode. This is not take your side. This is not name your party. I will not tell you that one side of the American political spectrum is the problem. If that is what you came to this podcast for, you're going to be disappointed. What I'm here to do instead is to name a system, a system that profits from the conflict between both sides simultaneously. A system that does not care which party you vote for, only that you vote terrified. A system that has taken genuine disagreement, the kind that democracies are built on, and engineered into it something more useful, sustained, monetized, and weaponize, and that is anxiety. I'm going to show you the architect of that system today. I'm going to show you the data underneath it. I'm going to make an argument that America is not polarized as the system needs you to believe it is. And then I'm going to hand you a specific framework for reclaiming the clarity that the system has been designed to steal from us. This is a conversation for leaders because leaders cannot afford to make decisions from inside a fear environment. And right now, most of us are operating in exactly that environment without even knowing it. Let's get into it.

Follow The Money Behind Anxiety

Keith D. Terry 3:53

Let me start with the money, because the money tells you everything. In September 2025, just three major networks, just three, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC collectively generated over $208 million in ad revenue in one single month. One single month. Fox News alone accounted for over $100 million of that revenue. According to data compiled, the performance aligned directly with Fox's consistent rating dominance during high-stake news cycles. That phrase is doing a lot of work. Let me tell you what it really means, the more anxious you are, the better their numbers look. The U.S. cable news industry annual revenue sits above $7 billion. And what does that industry sell? Let me be specific. Research published by the University of Colorado analyzed data from six major news outlets over a 12-year period of time. The finding politics dominate coverage at roughly 60%, raising to 75% during election years. And here's what the lead researcher said about what's driving those numbers. It's anger. Anger is very powerful. That's a senior finance researcher describing the editorial strategy of the American news media. Now let's add an additional wrinkle to it because cable news is only one part of the architecture. The MIT Media Lab studied the mechanics of content virality and found in research that was widely cited and extensively replicated that emotional content triggering fear and outrage generates six times more engagement over neutral and positive content. Six times the same thing we saw with news. Six times more comments, six times more reach, six times more like. The platforms decide what content to show you based on what is true or useful. They show you what drives engagement. And what drives engagement is what makes you feel something intense. Fear is the highest performing emotion in that system. So we saw it in media, we saw it in, we saw it in the news, and we see it in social media. Now, let me connect those two systems with what is happening inside of you. The American Psychological Association, in a stress survey, found that Americans who consume more than four hours of news daily report 45% higher anxiety levels than those who consumed under one. 40%, that's not a rounding error. That is a measurable consequence of a specific information behavior. That pessimism costs far more than our bodies are telling us. And that headline should have stopped the business world cold. Global employees' engagement fell 20% in 2025. That is the lowest level since 2020, since the pandemic. And it marks two consecutive years of decline. More striking still, that disengagement has cost the world economy an estimated $10 trillion of lost productivity. 90% of global GDP gone, not because of a recession, not because of a pandemic, because people have stopped caring about their work. Now, I'm not saying that all of that disengagement is caused by the fear economy, but I am saying this. When the people sitting in your organizations are consuming four plus hours of anxiety-producing media daily, when they're checking social media feeds engineered to produce outrage, when they're walking into your building carrying a chronic stress load that the media has been deliberately delivering and monetizing, you feel it. You feel it. The culture of your organization feels it. Your decision making feels it. Your strategy feels it. The fear economy does not stay in the screen. It walks into the boardroom. Now let me tell you who built this because the architecture that I'm talking about did not assemble itself.

Why Polarization Looks Worse Than It Is

Keith D. Terry 8:19

Here is the argument I'm going to make, and I'm going to make it without any apology. America is not polarized. America is afraid. And the fear has been so effectively monetized that it now feels like polarization. Let me draw that distinction carefully because it is the most important intellectual move. Polarization, in its truest definition, means that people can hold fundamentally incompatible values and cannot move towards agreement. That is a description of permanent structural division. And the narrative you have been fed for a decade says that it is exactly where America is, hopelessly divided, in a uh hopelessly divided, irreconcilably split, two tribes who share nothing and want nothing from each other. The data does not support that narrative. The populist research organization conducted a survey titled The American Aspiration Index, a study designed specifically to measure what Americans actually want from the country when they are not being prompted by partisan frames, which the researchers described as stunning agreement show broad consensus on national goals across segments of the U.S. population. Check this out, including, and I want you to hear this, among the people who voted for Donald Trump and the people who voted for Joe Biden on nearly every fundamental aspiration. Here they go. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a research published in 2023 and then updated again in 2025, found something more telling. Republicans and Democrats systematically overestimate the degree to which the other side dehumanizes them and disagrees with them. They're more divided in their perception of the divide than the actual value. And here's why that matters. The research also found that people who overestimate that divide are more likely to put their political party over the general good of the country. They are more likely to distrust civic institutions. They are more likely to support undemocratic behavior by their own side in retaliation for what they believe the other side wants to do. The perception of divide is more dangerous than the division itself. Now here is the question that follows. If Americans are not as divided as the narrative claims, who benefits from the narrative?

Who Profits From The Divide Narrative

Keith D. Terry 11:21

Let me name three. The first, the cable news industry. I already knew the numbers, but I want you to I want to be more precise about the business model. The University of Colorado research that I talked about found the Fox News spends 60% of its coverage on Democrats, while MSNBC spends the equivalent share on Republicans. Both networks are primarily covering the other side. That's not journalism. That is a product design. The product is the other side. The product is your outrage about the other side. And the revenue comes from keeping you enraged enough to stay tuned. The second system is political fundraising. In 2024, during the U.S. presidential cycle, campaign finance reached record levels. We heard that before. With hundreds of millions of dollars raised across major campaigns. Research on political fundraising consistently finds that most the most effective solicitations are not hope, not on policy, but on threat. The most effective subject line in political fundraising is a version of this. They're coming for everything you love. The more afraid you are of the other side, the more likely you are to give. Political organizations have studied this with the same precision that the social media platforms studies have. And the winner is fear because fear converts architecture. The third system is social media algorithm design. I said this in the opening, and I want to go deeper here. The algorithm doesn't show what is important, it shows you what is engaging. Say that again. The algorithm doesn't show you what is important, it shows you what is engaging. Those are different things. The MIT research on content virality documented a clear and consistent pattern with fear and outrage, specifically producing the highest engagement multipliers. The platform knows this. They built systems that optimize for this. They built systems to optimize this. When you log in after a long day of working and you see feeds of alarming headlines, manipulated outrage, and tribal conflict, that feed's not random. It was curated by a system designed to keep you nervous, keep you elevated, because activated nervous system clicks, shares, and returns.

Leadership In A Fear Environment

Keith D. Terry 14:02

You're not using social media. Now, I want to pivot right here because this is where I have to be honest about something that goes deeper than strategy for me. Scripture that anchors my practice as a leader and as a believer is 2 Timothy 1.7. For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound judgment or sound mind. I want you to hear that as more than a devotional comfort statement and hear it as a more of a diagnostic mandate. A spirit of fear produces a specific set of leadership outcomes. It produces a reactive decision. It produces the avoidance of necessary conflict. It produces the optimization of short-term safety over long-term strategy. It produces the inability to sit in ambiguity long enough to find the real answer. Fear makes you smaller than you actually are. The architecture I've been describing, cable news, political fundraising, social media algorithm, is all in the business of producing exactly that spirit, not power, not love, not sound judgment, but rather fear. And the question I want every leader listening to me right now is this. How much of your recent decision making has been made from inside the spirit of fear? Not your stated strategy, not your public posture, the actual decision. The one you made at 11 o'clock at night after scrolling for hours, the conversation you avoided because the stakes are too high. The strategic initiative you delayed because the environment felt uncertain. The leadership act you did not take because the cost of being wrong felt unbearable. That's not polarization. That is a leadership tax. And the fear economy is collecting it from you daily.

How Anxiety Hits Organizations

Keith D. Terry 16:10

Here's the additional organizational dimension that most commentary on this topic completely miss. Here it is. Fear does not just corrupt your personal clarity, it corrupts organizational decision making at every level. Think about what happens inside your a room of leaders who are all carrying chronic anxiety loads. Decisions get made to manage perception rather than solve problems. Difficult conversations get deferred. Strategic bets get shrunk to reduce the risk. Innovation gets sacrificed at the altar of uncertainty. The organization optimizes for survival rather than growth. You heard what I said. The organization optimizes for survival rather than growth. The Gallup engagement data confirms this in the aggregate. Managers, manager engagement has dropped nine percentage points since 2022. The managers in your organization, the people responsible for translating strategy into execution, are disengaging at historically high rates. And the Gallup research shows that 70% of a team's engagement follows that of the manager. When the manager disengages, the team follows. And when the team follows, the culture follows. And when the culture follows, the strategy collapses. And here's the part that should disturb you. We are building AI systems, new platforms, and ambitious strategies on top of a workforce that is operating at 20% gagement. 20%. We are engineering the future with people whose attention has been captured by fear, by a fear machine, whose discretionary energy has been systematically extracted by an economy designed to monetize their anxiety. That is not a talent problem. That is an information environment problem. And it has a solution.

A Three-Part Framework To Opt Out

Keith D. Terry 18:19

So what do we do about that? I'm going to give you a framework in three parts. This is not theoretical. I've lived each of these disciplines personally, and I can tell you that they work. Not because I'm clever, but because they attack the actual mechanism of the problem. The first solution, manage your information diet with the same discipline you manage your physical diet. Most serious leaders are meticulous about what they eat. They understand that chronic consumption of the wrong inputs put health consequences that eventually become organizational consequences, that are eventually, that will eventually become organizational consequences. The same logic applies to your information environment. I want you to start with a ruthless audit. Ask yourself this. For every information source you consume regularly, does this source produce clarity or anxiety? Does it change my behavior in a positive direction, or does it only change my cortisol level? Is the information here actionable or is it designed to alarm me into engagement? Very powerful question. If the source consistently produces anxiety without producing any corresponding action of clarity, it is not informing you, it's monetizing you. And I want to be clear about the distinction I'm making here. I'm not telling you to build an informational bubble. I'm not telling you to stop engaging with difficult realities. The world has genuine problems that require your leadership attention. What I'm telling you is that the systems designed to deliver information to you are also designed to distort it in the direction of alarm. Your job is to get the signal without ingesting the distortion. How do you do that? You go to primary sources. How do you do that? You go to two primary sources. Here's what I say: you go to the primary source, you read the actual report, not the headline about the report. You spend time with thinkers across ideological spectrum, not because you have to agree with them, but the truth is by spending time with intellectual people who have a different perspective than you is categorically different than looking at something that outrages you on social media. One builds thinking, the other one degrades it.

Decision Hygiene Against Fear

Keith D. Terry 20:47

Two, build decision-making hygiene that protects you from fear-based choices. Here's what I'm saying. Here's the practice that I use. Before any significant, any significant decision, I ask myself one question. Am I making this decision from clarity or from fear? Not from principle, not from principle, not from strategy, from clarity. Because clarity includes principle and strategy. Fear excludes both. Now you may disagree with me. A practical tool for any senior leader is a required 48-hour delay on any decisions made in a heightened emotional state. That is not indecisiveness. That is discipline. The nervous system that was activated by the fear machine needs time to return to baseline before it can make any strategic decisions. Give it time before you commit to anything consequential. Inside your organizations, build decision making frameworks that explicitly name the emotional state in the room. Before a major decision, name what you are feeling, not your analysis. If the room is afraid, say so. Name the fear. Examine it. Determine whether it is a legitimate risk signal or a fear economy artifact. Because there is a difference between the two. Which is strategic and chronic, which is corrosive. The leader who cannot make that distinction inside themselves cannot help their organizations make it either.

Culture That Rewards Clarity

Keith D. Terry 22:24

Now the final part, part three, build an organizational culture that rewards clarity and penalizes reactivity. This is the hardest part. And this is the part most leaders skip. The fear economy has trained your team to respond to signal of alarm with urgency. Every breaking news alert, every political development produces a reflective organizational response. A meeting is called, strategies are questioned, initiatives paused, and most of those responses are wasted energy responding to noise not signal. Your job as the leader is to differentiate between noise and signal for your organization. That means you model the posture you want. You do not arrive at the Monday morning leadership meeting breathless from the weekend news cycle. You arrive having processed the news cycle through the filter you value, your strategies, your clarity about what actually matters to the people, to the mission that you care about. In my practice, I begin every morning in prayer and scripture before I touch any single headline. Not as a religious performance, as a strategic discipline. I need to know who I am, what I believe, and where I'm going before the fear machine gets the first access of my attention. Because if the fear machine gets to me first, it frames my day. And the frame the fear machine provides is always the same. And it goes like this. You're behind. You're under threat. You need to be afraid. For me, I refuse that frame every morning. I refuse that frame. Every morning before anything else, I read my scripture. And I'm center my day. When you model clarity under pressure, real sustained, grounded clarity, your organization recalibrates around it. You become the steady signal in a noisy environment. And that is not just a personal practice. It is your single most powerful contribution to your organization that you're responsible for.

Your Personal Fear Audit

Keith D. Terry 24:36

Now, my call to action for you. Before this weekends, I want you to conduct a personal fear audit. You heard me. I want you to conduct a personal fear audit. Sit down with an actual piece of paper and list every news source, every social media account, every conversation, and every relationship in your life that consistently generates anxiety without producing any corresponding action. Not sources that inform you, sources that alarm you. There is a difference. An informed leader makes better decisions. An alarm leader makes faster decisions worse. Once you have that list, and I suspect it'll take you longer than you expect, not temporarily, not for a social media fast that ends on Thursday, but I mean permanently. And I want you to replace each one of them with sources that produce clarity instead of cortisol. A practice that I think you could use is you could pray, you can meditate, you can do some deep reading, you could take long walks without your phone that reconnect you with your own judgment. I want to be I want to be direct about the stakes here. I want to be direct with you about the stakes here. I just earlier talked to you about manager engagement has dropped nine percentage points. Leaders who are drowning in the fear environment cannot lead. They can only react. And organizations led by reactive leaders, regardless of how smart they are, how talented those leaders are, cannot execute strategy, cannot build culture, cannot grow through the kind of sustained uncertainty that defines this moment. Leaders who cannot manage their own information or environment cannot manage anything else. Start here. This week, three sources permanently removed and replaced by ones that provide clarity. I want to leave you with this. People running the fear economy are not stupid. They've studied human psychology, built sophisticated algorithmic machine systems, they've invested billions of dollars in understanding exactly how to capture and hold your attention through emotional activation. But here's what they cannot manufacture. They cannot manufacture clarity. They cannot manufacture the kind of deep, grounded confidence that comes from a leader who knows who they are, what they believe, and why it matters. They cannot manufacture the organizational culture that forms around a leader who refuses to make a decision out of fear. They cannot manufacture the trust that a team builds in its leader who they cannot manufacture the trust that a team builds in a leader who is proven consistently under pressure in uncertain environments that their judgment is independent of the noise. The most subservient thing a leader can do in a fear economy is to genuinely, visibly, sustainably be unafraid. Not because nothing is hard, things are generally hard, but here you have access to something fear machine cannot monetize, the power, the love, and the sound judgment that Scripture says is available to every leader willing to reach it. America is not lost, America's fray. And the leader who decides to opt out of the fear-based economy, not just personally but organizationally, are the ones who will be positioned to lead when the noise finally clears.

Final Challenge And How To Help

Keith D. Terry 28:20

That's all I have for you today, and I'm grateful you were here. Until next time. Thanks for listening to the Next Big Thing. I'm your host, Keith D.Terry. If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support this podcast, please share it with others. Post about it on social media or leave a rating and a review. To catch all the latest from me, you can follow me on my YouTube channel at Keith D.Terry. If you want to recommend a guest, please email me at infoterryperformancegroup.com. This has been produced by your host and Jade Productions.