by Joe Miller
As I write this line, the top news story at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and Fox News is the unexpected passing of Lindsey Graham, the long-time U.S. Senator from South Carolina. All four outlets have high-profile articles about hostilities in Iran, as well.
After that, their coverage differs. CNN has an “above the fold” piece about youth soccer in the U.S. The NYT has a day-in-the-life story about a celebrity in Brooklyn. Fox has an article about the 1994 murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. The Post has an exclusive interview with a defense contractor who is seeking a pardon after bribing Navy officials to secure $45 million in contracts.
Closer to home, the Charleston Gazette features stories about executive branch meddling in America 250 celebrations and the state attorney general leading efforts to delay EPA restrictions on vehicle emissions.
Across the country, thousands of newspapers and news websites report on the very latest things. It’s a huge array of facts whose only real commonality is that editors and reporters have deemed them “newsworthy.”
Secretly, though, all those news stories have a second thing in common. They are all about things that will make zero difference in the day-to-day lives of everyone reading these words.
Neil Postman, who taught media theory at NYU from 1959 until his death in 2003, argues that information is useful only when it is actionable. It is useful to know when the school board is meeting to discuss the budget because we can show up to that meeting and express our own preferences about priorities.
Knowing that JD Vance is meeting with Iranian officials to negotiate an end to hostilities is not especially useful. There are no actions that anyone reading this column could conceivably take that would in any way affect the outcome of those negotiations.
The idea of “news of the day” – that there is a category of facts about the world that are unactionable but nevertheless important to know – is a fairly recent one.
In “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Postman argues that it’s really only with the advent of the telegraph that we began hearing about current events from distant places. The ability to transmit information more-or-less instantaneously across long dis- tances allowed for newspapers filled with information about events that we cannot influence in any meaningful way and that have no real impact on our daily lives.
Television exacerbated that trend, ultimately blurring the distinction between news and entertainment. On Postman’s account, there is very little practical difference between watching a “60 Minutes” report on corruption in the Middle East and streaming “Syriana,” the 2005 George Clooney film that covers much of the same ground.
You can see the blurring most clearly on shows like “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” or “The Daily Show,” comedy shows that revolve around real-world political and policy questions. These shows are part of a long tradition that includes late night monologues and Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.”
We see the blurring from the other direction, too, when lawyers from Fox News successfully defended the network from a 2020 slander lawsuit by arguing that a reasonable person would understand that Tucker Carlson’s show was not news and that his remarks are “loose, figurative or hyperbolic.”
Documents from the network’s (unsuccessful) defense of a lawsuit for defamation revealed that its own news anchors privately did not believe their own on-air statements about election fraud in 2020. They were simply making good television, not reporting facts.
Today, we have former Fox News entertainers holding jobs as cabinet secretaries where they make news that is covered by still other journalists who turn news into entertainment.
The snake has eaten its own tail.
Postman argues that the real danger of this type of contextless infotainment is that we lose the ability to distinguish what is important.
That’s how we ended up spending a couple of weeks in 2015 arguing about the color of a dress. It’s what led to several days of media coverage – and an actual Senate resolution! – about Sen. John Fetterman wearing shorts on the Senate floor. It’s why a man lost his day job for dressing in drag and reading a children’s book to rescue dogs.
Media coverage of John Fetterman’s choice of clothing sat alongside coverage of a United Autoworkers strike against American automakers, the war in Ukraine and a looming government shutdown that would have left millions of Americans without a paycheck.
And yet a subset of normal, American adult people—some of them elected to govern a nation of 325 million people with real problems that need real solutions—blew them up into multi-day controversies.
When your business runs on eyeballs, it doesn’t really matter much what gets them there.
I don’t think that television (or podcasts or social media or radio or any other form of electronic media) makes us dumber.
But I worry that getting news from those kinds of sources probably does.
