We do many awfully stupid things in life. One of mine was to go several years without
taking a vacation. I was just too busy, obviously too indispensible to take time off.
What an idiot, what kind of a life was that? So I made a pledge to myself: take vacations
and truly vacate. My chosen retreat was
the Caribbean off-season, ultimately on the small and beautiful island of St.
Barths. Along with my decision not to
forego time off came some self-imposed rules.
First and foremost was to have no contact with my office. The second was not to read newspapers or otherwise
tune in to the news. Both were possible
on the island. This was a vacation, a
rest, from the work world and the whole world.
I would stay in St. Barths for a couple of weeks, governed by my rules
of disengagement.
Guess what?
My office was there when I returned and the business functioned
perfectly well for the weeks without my indispensible
presence. And what about the news? The day I returned to reading the Times et al it appeared that nothing had
happened in my absence. It was
essentially the same news just repeating itself. To be sure there was some single story
commanding obsessive and urgent coverage (think Ebola) while just yesterday’s
(Ferguson) similarly singular focus had receded from the headlines. And yes, the names and places being covered
may have changed somewhat, but remarkably much what had been happening before
my escape was still happening after, treading water much as does, surprise,
real life. Well, you’ll say, that may
have been the case during those vacations but momentous, transformational,
things do happen. Think for example if I
had been on retreat on 9/11? Got
me! But not really, events like that are
exceptional. Moreover, when something
big occurs we can be sure it will be reported ad infinitum for an extended
period of time. Juicy news events are never allowed to rest or fade away. 9/11 was milked for weeks and months on end
and, to some degree, still is.
…Only that shall happen,
which has happened. Only that occurs,
which has occurred. There is nothing new beneath the sun.
Ecclesiastes dates back to around 250-300 BCE — that’s
a long time and a lot learning ago. So we
might fairly argue with its blanket assertion.
For sure really new things have been discovered over the years, a
process that continues — think new drugs or technologies. On the most elemental level, most of us have
experienced the new, or the new to us. And
maybe the operative phrase new to us
is the point. Perhaps it explains why so
much of what is reported as “news” comes to us with little surprise. We approach it with a sense of déjà vu,
something we’ve heard or seen it before or, as with my post vacation experience,
little and mostly nothing new has happened.
In recent years the character of the “news” we
encounter has shifted, though not necessarily for the first time. These things
tend to by cyclical (nothing new). In
the golden era of network news, what we may call the (Edward R.) Murrow and immediate post Murrow
era, broadcast news was mostly delivered both objectively and
authoritatively. No one embodied that
tradition more than Walter Cronkite who anchored on CBS for
nineteen eventful years (1962-81).
Cronkite was seen as “the most trusted man in America”, someone we could
depend on to deliver it straight and clear.
It was Cronkite who told us definitively that Kennedy was dead, and once
he announced it speculation became fact.
When, in a very rare display of opinion, he voiced doubts about our
mission in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson declared, “If we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve
lost middle America”. When Cronkite
stepped down (a move he soon regretted much as had TR promising not to run for another
term), the era’s demise would follow. It
took some years, but in proper cyclical fashion (Ecclesiastes “To everything
there is a time an season”) the news would revert to the kind of (William Randolph) Hearst tabloidization we see
today. Not only is the news rarely new,
it is sometimes seems fabricated out of whole cloth.
If Cronkite was the epitome of trustworthy
journalism, Ted Turner is the one responsible in
large measure for what came after. Two
years before “Uncle Walter’s” retirement, Turner launched CNN, the 24/7 “news”
service that by definition was destined to quickly obsolete the new in news by
repeating it over and over. Once the
novelty, the newness, wore off, whatever importance it might have had was
greatly diminished. Far more
significant, is that CNN and its successors had to fill a lot of empty space. The fast-paced up to the minute “headline” or
telegraphic format they latched on to proved inhospitable to in-depth
journalism. To keep its audience 24/7,
content had to be entertaining, and to build loyalty (a base) it had to abandon
objectivity. This is not to discount how
CNN started — it was the place to be when big news broke — but ultimately it
had to face the real world where big news
is by far the exception not the norm. In
that no news is new place, they essentially had to find another way to make a
sustainable living. Fox and MSNBC followed
suit, albeit in a more hyperbolic mode. For them new is not even the issue or
objective.
What CNN wrought should serve as a cautionary lesson
for the likes of the NY Times and Washington Post who are themselves
transitioning from once a day (print) to 24/7 (on-line). Their news focus remains pretty solid — for
this discussion in the Cronkite mode — but more entertainment is edging its way
onto their digital front pages. They
want to keep us engaged and think to do that something entertaining, more
fluff, is required. They are probably
right. Thus far an appropriate balance
remains, but that was true in Turner’s early days. 24/7 news was predicated on the idea that
people want to access information at their convenience (a prescient precursor
to our on-demand internet culture), but it also assumed there was a large
news-junky audience hungering for more food.
What’s happened, even to those assumed junkies, is that news, especially
when so little of it is really new or new any more.
As I’ve been suggesting all along precious little of
what we claim to be new really is new and that is a challenge for those who are
charged with giving us the news. Part
of their problem of course is that much as we claim to want depth even the most
devoted junkies often don’t get far beyond a story’s headline. The power of the headline has long been
understood and not only by the Hearst’s of this world but by the Sulzberger’s
as well. How often have each of us read
a headline only to find that the copy below tells a vastly different
story. Headlines are meant to entice us
and writing them is an art. When the
editor or writer has an agenda headlines are often employed as tools of opinion. Aggregators of the news like Huff Post will
take a perfectly straight forward story from the Times, Post, or other
publications and headline it into a
partisan sensation. Needless to say,
their counterparts on the Right do exactly the same. The sad thing is that headlining of this kind
has become the sum total of our political campaigns, all sound bytes no substance.
Headlines, they used to say, sell newspapers. And so they do even when “paper” has morphed into
digital screens. Dig beneath the surface of the hype and you’ll probably join
me in concluding that very little truly new is happening — nothing
new under the sun. On an
intellectual level we’re on to that lack of newness, but we happily play the
game. And why is that? I’d venture a guess. We pretend the news is new, but there is
something reassuring in knowing that it’s just more of the dependable
same. We actually like the pretense and
that, even more than the headlines, is what makes news sell. It is also why we demand precious little in
terms of quality and objectivity. We
don’t want to wake up from the dream, most especially in challenging
times. And that isn’t new.
Note: Days ago the fabled Ben
Bradley died in Washington. “No new news”
notwithstanding, great journalists existed in his hay day and they still do today. We would all be diminished were not that the
case.