Gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite
whose voices were familiar and respected and whose personal political leanings
were not revealed in their newscasts. The
research to validate the stories they released left consumers confortable with
the veracity of their newscasts no matter how reassuring or troubling the
information conveyed.
The journalists’ realm at the national level is all but
empty. The seats they once occupied have
been filled with the Lauers, Blitzers, Maddows, Limbaughs, and Hannitys, and a
slew of others like them. These
celebrities are commentators on political matters whose shows have become
entertainment for many adults. These commentators make no effort to provide
balanced, or even well substantiated, news stories. Their stock in trade is shrill, partisan
hyperbole, and their perspectives are clearly and redundantly articulated. Viewers and listeners can choose their
entertainment by tuning to the channel or frequency occupied by commentators
with whom they agree.
I’m prepared to
argue that this shift from serious reporting on confirmed news events to
hysterical commentary often based on imagination is at the root of the
deepening philosophical divisions in the country and the world.
Two factors have led to the evolution from journalist to
infotainer: an abundance of available
broadcast time, and the ubiquity of publishing opportunity for everyone. Cable television began the evolution when Ted
Turner created CNN, a 24-hour news channel.
Programming grew to fill the newly available hours.
Today any of us can share our thoughts with the world at a
moment’s notice, regardless of the quality of those thoughts. Media’s habit of checking its sources to
confirm its suspicions made it unacceptably slow, so today those suspicions
form the bases for most of our “news”, and few seem alarmed by the opinion-as-news
phenomenon.
Evolution doesn’t stop, however. Today’s infotainers, craving viewers,
readers, and ratings, are systematically alienating the audiences upon which
they rely. Even the most partisan
citizens are tiring of the monotonous echo chambers in which some rave about
the real and imagined transgressions and inadequacies of our elected officials
and others blindly sing the praises of the same people. How many times a day must one listen to hypotheses
about electoral collusion with foreign actors and complaints about clumsily
worded “tweets” before I Love Lucy
re-runs become an appealing alternative?
Where does it end? It’s
hard to tell, but the trend line suggests that a divided electorate will be
ever more certain about its grasp of the truth even as objective information
becomes increasingly difficult to isolate from the noisy background.
