Some of you probably thought about this long ago, but it just clicked with me when I watched a segment on Discovery about how candy became connected to holidays. Back in the 1960s, television saturated American households. They said that between 1950 and 1960, households with televisions went from 8% to 89%. Whether that’s accurate or not, I don’t know, but even if the numbers are less than precise, the point was clear. Americans got their news from television, and there were only three networks, all of which told the same basic story.
What there wasn’t was cable news channels. What there wasn’t was journalists eschewing facts in favor of moral clarity. What there were not were channels dedicated to pushing one tribe’s narrative and denigrating the other’s. What there were not were viewers who watched the station that fed them what they wanted to hear, validated their priors and fed them “news” without regard to facts.
The result, of course, is a country not merely divided, but forming their beliefs based on two distinct realities. It wasn’t a debate about what was best to do for a nation struggling to find a direction, but what reality was the subject of discussion. Without a shared reality, we were talking about two very different worlds. Without a shared reality, we became suckers for lies because we trusted no one to tell us the truth when it conflicted with our reality.
Can we ever go back to a shared reality?
The chasm into which cable news immediately fell following the election started forming, I am quite sure, when media decided that the best way to stay successful was to pit citizens against one another. At the outset, this happened at least semi-organically. Trump was a bizarre choice for Republicans, the presidency was thought to be Hillary’s destiny, it didn’t take much to induce partisan agitation, to get people overly receptive to believing the worst and keep them anxious about the state of play, which, coincidentally, was pretty good for the bottom line.
Whereas cable had once covered the news, it now became arbiters of the news, then its curators. Any tidbit that could be shoveled in the overheated furnace and blasted into our faces would do. It did not matter if the stories were strictly true or true at all; it mattered that people became addicts to whatever flavor of news was being fed to them, that they could be made into cable’s very own cash cows, reliably pooping out dollars.
Until they weren’t.
One week after the election, the ratings for CNN and MSNBC fell off a cliff. Nancy Rommelmann recounts how it happened, recalling such memories as CNN’s “mostly peaceful demonstrations” fiasco.
As I tend to turn on MSNBC in order to fall asleep at night, I can well remember the unequivocal certainty that Kamala Harris was the next president, not merely because Trump was so horrible, but because she was so fabulous, running a “perfect campaign” and evoking joy wherever she went. I remained unconvinced, but then I often yelled offensive words at the television when MSNBC was playing, particularly when their “legal analysts” misexplained law to the gushing appreciation of the hosts.
Nancy, who is one of the bravest people I know, has been trying something different.
Last Tuesday night in New York City, I attended the first on-stage performance of Mark Halperin’s The Morning Meeting, a weekday news show that airs live on YouTube and on Halperin’s new 2Way platform, on which I’ve several times appeared as a talking head. The meetings, which happen most weekdays at 9am and 6pm, are attended via Zoom by hundreds of people, any of whom has the opportunity to question, and at length, the hosts of the day.
Unlike the news climate we’ve been burdened with since at least 2015, the 2Way audience does not slant any particular way. Pre-election, Halperin often asked Zoomers to ID where they were from and how they voted, and the results were usually evenly divided between Rs and Ds, with a smattering of Bernie bros and maybe a Stein fan and more than a few “I’m not voting for either presidential candidate,” including yours truly. With the exception of once seeing cohost Sean Spicer take exception with Halperin calling RFK Jr. “a kook,” participants do not show an appetite to denigrate others or, as I wrote in an article that will run tomorrow, “opportunistically looking to chew the other guy’s face off.”
Having never watched the Meeting, and having been remarkably unimpressed with some of the other co-hosts of the Circus, most notably Alex Wagner who has the intellectual prowess of a twinkie, I’m going to give it a try. That said, it lacks the one virtue of television news from the ’60s, that the three networks drew from the same reality and provided a nation with a shared reality about which we could disagree all we wanted, but at least could do so talking about the same thing.
Will Halperin, whose cancellation as a sexual predator killed the Circus, be the alternative? I can’t speak from personal experience as to whether he’s trustworthy, yet, as I’ve not yet followed Nancy’s advice. But it seems unlikely that he will gain sufficient traction to replace the network or cable news, and it’s doubtful from the description that his concept will work beyond a small audience.
But that it doesn’t pander to one side or the other is a nice change. Can the rest of the news media change too? Can it return to reporting news with hard facts without regard to which narrative it serves? Can we once again trust the news so that we have a shared reality upon which to argue and disagree, but in the same reality?
Betteridge’s law of headlines suggests the answer is no.
The problem goes way back. The 3 main networks were suspected of slanted coverage in the 80’s and this was all but confirmed when Dan Rather said, “We won!” in 1991 regarding Bill Clinton’s election.
And to some degree, there are 2 worlds, big cities are an alternate reality compared to the rest of the U.S.
“What there wasn’t was journalists eschewing facts in favor of moral clarity.”
Yes, there were. There always have been. What we’re seeing now is nothing new. It’s more obvious, both because the “journalists” have stopped pretending to be unbiased, and because there are other sources to contradict them. It is, perhaps, more egregious than it was 30 years ago. But what we’re seeing is a change in degree, not a change in kind.
There is a difference in kind between flawed people attempting to be unbiased and people attempting to sell propaganda, so I disagree.
I disagree, based on 35 years in the business. There are a group of people that have long believed that journalists were all leftists and intentionally skewed the news to favor the left. They also believed that journalists were in thrall to their corporate masters.
But the reality is that neither of these beliefs were grounded in reality. While reporters did tend to tilt to the left, publishers and top executives tended to be conservative. News organizations kept a firewall between finances and news coverage, and reporters (and their editors) were supposed to have a degree of self-awareness about their own personal beliefs and strive for impartiality. Back then, that is.
Today, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish opinion from “fact,” and the idea that journalists strive for impartiality is laughable.
That’s a tidal change.
Samuel Clements.
“I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists, and the opinion of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence in private, but when they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking (the pygmy scribe is not visible) and then their utterances shake the community like the thunders of prophecy.”
Perhaps the larger question is whether we should ever have trusted the news. Even when they supported more or less the same “reality” in their presentations to the public, it wasn’t always an objectively factual reality. For years, decades even, the mainstream media stood behind the notion that world communism was a monolithic threat, and that it had to be countered on every hill to prevent every free society from falling like dominoes. The function of the FBI during the 1950s and 1960s, including its clandestine efforts to undermine the civil rights movement, was starkly different than the media portrayal. Likewise, if we compare media reporting of the Vietnam conflict with what we now know was actually happening (later replayed to a degree in Afghanistan) the media largely sold the public a pipe dream. It was a commonly subscribed pipe dream, but reliable it was not.
Cable news is finished
[Ed. Note: Why do you test me, LY?]