Back in my day and in Germany, "news" was from 20:00 to 20:15 with the last 5 or so minutes of that were dedicated to the Bundesliga :)
This is how the news was for me as a 90s kid who only had over the air channels for TV. 6:00-6:30PM was local news, 6:30-7:00PM was World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Outside of that folks weren't particularly concerned with what was happening beyond their immediate bubble.
I blame CNN for much of the state of news today. TV news has always been poor, but before CNN proved otherwise, news was not something that was considered a profit-maker. Once CNN showed it can make money, then the profit maximalization began in earnest, and with that came the descent into news-as-entertainment.
That started well before the gulf war.
As an aside, 99% invisible had a pretty good podcast on how radio (which delivers news to more Americans -and is trusted more- than TV) content has changed over the years. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-divided-dial/
The change has been systemic, and that change shaped CNN more than the other way around.
Which has an effect on the political process.
It's not that I want the ads so much as I want a short break from consuming the content.
And that was pretty much it.
I don't know if I'd call newspapers long form, as they certainly have lots of short articles, but I'd say they regularly have "longer form" than Frontline.
There are not enough relevant things going on in the world to merit a 24-hour news cycle, so the media has to make things up to fill the gaps. But once they make things up, they're pathologically incapable of distinguishing their own made-up crap from actual relevant news items.
So we spend the day glued to our phones flooded in crap.
While true, I can't help but think everyone who says that is talking about "other people" (mostly people on the other side but maybe a few from my side) or "other news sources" (mostly ones from the other side that I don't watch and maybe a few isolated examples on my side).
Some of us are mostly adjacent. I'm a right-leaning libertarian. I actually dislike when people refer to modern progressives as "liberal" as it's pretty insulting to classic liberals who also aren't into where progressives have gone. I never voted for Trump, don't really like him. I have to admit, I did/do enjoy how worked up those with TDS get about him though. But it's completely hyperbolic on both ends, and there's more dishonesty about the man than from the man.
Many people want the establishment out... the problem is, as above, that there are several camps of what people believe should prevail in terms of direction... so no traction gains and the establishment wins. I'm thinking more people on either side should start voting for more anti-establishment candidates all around. They may be a bit cooky, but in the end, if they're willing to negotiate we could see better outcomes overall that at least try to serve the people and not the establishment insiders.
News companies, specifically news company executives looking to sell as much ad revenue as possible, and are willing to produce any content that gets viewership, are to blame.
> Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
No, it's television in general. People were famously making that exact same point in the 1980s, before the widespread adoption of cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death. tl;dr: the medium is the message, and the message of television is entertainment, even when the news was only a half-hour a day.
"... the human race is divided into two distinct and irreconcilable groups:
those that walk into rooms and automatically turn television sets on,
and those that walk into rooms and automatically turn them off.
The trouble is that they end up marrying each other."
Is it a supply issue, or a demand issue? If people didn't want want it in the first place, would the producers bother to make it?
We've had salacious media for a long time:
> Scandal sheets were the precursors to tabloid journalism. Around 1770, scandal sheets appeared in London, and in the United States as early as the 1840s.[4] Reverend Henry Bate Dudley was the editor of one of the earliest scandal sheets, The Morning Post, which specialized in printing malicious society gossip, selling positive mentions in its pages, and collecting suppression fees to keep stories unpublished.[5]: 11–14 Other Georgian era scandal sheets were Theodore Hook's John Bull, Charles Molloy Westmacott's The Age, and Barnard Gregory's The Satirist.[5]: 53 William d'Alton Mann, owner of the scandal sheet Town Topics, explained his purpose:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
-Steve Jobs
He also said "We don’t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
Of course he was kind of wrong about televisions and PCs not merging - see youtube, netflix, Apple TV, etc.
To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale. This is unlikely to happen for the same reasons we make every other stupid choice as a citizenry. Also: picture the quality of leaders we vote into Congress and try to imagine them doing anything as high-minded as solving the problems of the news media fellating them half the time, and flogging them the remainder. (Literal extensions of the metaphor juxtaposed with contemporary congressional scandals are left as an exercise for the reader.)
Take $10B of annual spend out of the US budget. Which will never be missed. Fund a public network that only does news. The budget is something like 2-3X FOX News' top line; it's enough to hire real talent and smart leaders. Give the public network one KPI and a new line item: they fund an arm's length fact-checking service or some other form of objective evaluator to score them every day for remaining factual and balanced (and be clear when it's news and when it's opinion). I don't know that you can do 100% facts in the real world -- but can you be balanced, non-sensational, and transparent? The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day -- apparently we can do this when it sells, so scoring truthfulness isn't impossible.
It seems stupid that we can't take a sub-rounding error of opex out of the budget and do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage, so maybe I've got it wrong. Even if I don't, we're not smart enough to make something like this reality.
This is simply not true. There is no demand. That's why the news industry forced google, youtube, facebook, etc to push their product all over their platforms. The news industry literally got government to force tech companies to peddle their noxious product.
> To me, the only plausible shift to more fact-based and balanced coverage happens via subsidies -- the government has to insert itself into the market and put its thumb on the scale.
This has got to be the dumbest or the most naive thing I've read in a while. If you get government involved, then you'd get garbage statist propaganda. Also it would really put a dent on the false myth about journalists 'holding power to account' when they are paid by the government.
> The media did a yeoman-like job of fact-checking Trump every day
The media that created the Trump brand, the media that gave him 24/7 free publicity, the media that got him elected, etc? That's the media you are praising?
> do something that would have this kind of positive societal leverage
The problem in society is news. More news or more government funded news is not the answer.
To me this seems like one of those “reality has a liberal bias” or “the positive aspects of negative thinking” - mainly that education and intellect are anticorrelated with happiness, that there are very few happy and informed people.
I’m not a news guy or a liberal but I think there’s a lot of ink being spilled over a phenomenon that could be explained simply by: the world is a very fucked up place and people are getting tired of hearing about it.
The problem, however, is the impact this change in political reporting has on actual politics. That, I'm not sure how to solve.
It used to be that pre-election debates were for nerds and policy wonks. Now everyone watches them, but all substance has been removed. Debates themselves may even cease to exist.
As opposed to being paid directly by the people they're supposed to hold accountable?
Government-funded media would at least have a fighting chance of being neutral, checks and balances and all. By all accounts the US justice system is corrupt as well, but it would obviously be orders of magnitude worse if you outsourced it to private corporations.
The product was already being produced pre-Internet, pre-television, pre-radio:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_journalism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
A new distribution medium didn't cause it to be created.
It's very similar to how professional wrestling isn't real wrestling, but actually 'wrestling entertainment'.
I call this the 'WWE-ification' of the news and politics.
If you synthesize all that happens in Washington in a day, it is a giant soap opera. IT keeps its power by keeping people paying attention to it. Even a "just the facts, maam" view of the news is largely rabblerousing. I wonder how much of what I see on https://www.memeorandum.com/river today will matter in 10 years. How much of it belongs in a history book. How much of it is needed to make an informed decision in an election. How much of it is needed to understand the world around me.
Mcluhan, his French counterparts, Deborah, ELlul, all understood something 60 years ago. Mass manufacturing and mass media are the key determinants of our society. The first has commoditized the physical things we surround ourselves with. The second commoditizes our dispositions. Political or economical arrangements matter so much less.
Taking that view, and the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology as we think it is. Just another means for media saturazition, washing out individual thought.
A salient effect, when everything is essentially the same, the only mechanism to differentiate is branding. Hence, everything is captured by marketing. Products are differentiated by their commercials, people differentiate themselves by the identity they assume, everything/everybody is thrown in a marketplace where comparison is based on image, not substance. Really nothing can be evaluated intrinsically anymore, our evaluation of everything gets mediated by a story, a narrative, an image. The matrix is real, not the living in the computer part, but the unease that everything is fake, everything is a projection.
If true, and it also explains why the classic California easy-going personality is now the dominant one. It is not even cool anymore to be 90s abrasive or cynical, that just elicits eye rolls (the rebellion in fight club looks quaint now, almost adorable). Better to just bland in.
The logical end point of this evolution is that we all become widgets. Essentially the same, responding to inputs, participants in algorithm, the only difference maybe the skinning, the look&feel. All undifferentiated tough.
May be true, may be not. But it certainly explains a lot of the last 150 years, and it makes our current era less special. which is comforting, we're not messing up in ways grandpa wasn't already doing so.
To pine for any kind of quaint return is missing the point entirely. The only way through is forward and out.
Not sure there is an easy answer. None of us want to be censored, but for sure the market has failed (both the demand side and the supply side, and there is lots of money to be made from all the fake controversy and scandal)
With the First Amendment we revoked Congress’ power as a lawmaking body to govern publishing. The market hasn’t failed, but other people are reading and believing things that you or I don’t agree with, but the difference is that you basically want to make them stop doing that, which I guess includes me as I am disagreeing with you here.
Don’t forget that all elected positions are Offices of Power and to seek an election is to seek to acquire power. I am more than happy to keep the flow of information outside the grasp of the types of people who seek to acquire an elected Office and the power vested in it, even at the risk that other people are wrong and take wrong actions with wrong information.
I certainly wouldn't trust or give politicians the ability to censor what they don't like.
As I said, this is a hard problem. No individual should be censored. But, as with most things, scale is a problem in of itself. There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit. There is significant profit in anger, fear, sowing divisions, artificial controversy; but this comes at a large detriment to us as a society.
That’s embarrassing. I actually did overstate the disagreement upon re-reading your prior comment. My apologies.
> There is a significant scale difference when I, as an individual, say whatever I want, vs when CNN or FOX (or pick whatever large scaled publisher you want) broadcasts falsehoods to everyone for their profit.
Even CNN and Fox can be held in check for literally lying, but by the people they’re lying about, and in turn they operate in a space where they report on a more powerful entity than themselves when they lie or subvert the truth. The American government is also a player in the information space, and its chief officials are not always telling the truth, or disclosing the full truth. So what we have is a wash in which information competes with information, and we don’t always have good, accurate or useful information where we need it or desire it. I still wouldn’t call this a market failure, people profit and lose off of good or bad information all the time; it’s when we allow ourselves to become tools for moneyed or empowered interests who use those programs and writings to induce action that we experience a very real human or political failure.
The purpose of the news industry is to inform, but it has always and will forever be at the behest of people with an interest in informing in a manner they prioritize in competition with other people with differing interests, and it is itself for-profit industry whether or not the profits are expressed on the P&L of a given corporation.
And you are never going to get the fairness doctrine to apply to those that are online.
You could have Facebook set rules for posts on their network, but then Facebook competes with Twitter and Tiktok and whatever, so if the posts on Facebook are less engaging than those on Twitter, people may go there.
Its all broken incentives all the way down.
Viewers are to blame. Cable and the internet are just better than ever monetizing the garbage people gravitate towards. There's more high quality journalism on offer than ever and it's audience just keep dwindling in favor of social media and purely fraudulent news like FOX.
That's a very bold claim but I can't say it's wild. The news is supposed to be a critical source of information but I think the effect is a net negative. By a large margin. It's a pretty perverse situation.
I don't think the government should ban news or anything. That's obviously bad. But society would probably be better off without it (as-is), as extreme as that would be.
Essentially this is arguing for limited distribution & gatekeepers for the news. That would almost certainly be better for society, but there's the problem with disenfranchisement & how you select/entrust gatekeepers. I don't think the "old" solutions to those problems were particularly good.
The solution to this tradegi of the commons is to ignore it all and read up on the various candidates a few weeks before the election.
And when entertainment isn't recharging our souls, giving us time off, isn't wholesome (which all apply to current news) we don't get what our souls need, and we become worse people individually and collectively.
Watching the 24 hour news cycle as entertainment is just like any kind of constant trauma, constant onslaught, constant conflict and it fundamentally is rewiring our brains individually and collectively
How about reinstating the fairness doctrine that changed (along with so much else) in the 1980s as a start? And creating some rules to prevent news sources from being used as propaganda machines by billionaires?
Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. I don't know what could be done about it. But we'd be way better off if "the news" was something you could watch from 7 PM - 8 PM if you were interested, or something you could read in a printed newspaper if you were really interested, and otherwise the general public could ignore it.
Instead we talk about the direction of the country and indeed, humanity itself, with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team, or voting people off the island on Survivor.