News used to be important; now it’s well-dressed entertainment

By David McElroy · January 31, 2012

Even though I spent a decade in the newspaper business, I’m not sure I know what “news” is anymore. What’s even worse is that I’m not sure I ever did know what it was. Was I in the news business? Or was I in the business of filling holes with trivia to attract readers for our advertisers?

There’s an argument that what we call news has always been fairly banal. A dictionary I consulted said that news is “information about recent and important events,” but who’s to say what’s important? If the market is deciding, isn’t there always going to be a race to the bottom — a race to attract people with sensational and emotional stories rather than any discussion of things that matter?

In “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau wrote of being concerned that our inventions were giving us a technological ability to communicate, but he worried that people didn’t have things to say to each other that really mattered:

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” [Emphasis mine]

What if our whiz-bang technology is ultimately empty in many ways? What if our incredible satellites and TV production facilities and complicated infrastructure give us the means to communicate with one another, but what if the things we have to say are banal and empty? That’s what I’m afraid of.

As I’ve spent time in doctors’ offices recently, I’ve been disgusted to see that the vast majority of people want to watch television — and they seem eager to consume whatever is put in front of them. Daytime programming makes me ill. I saw one show recently by someone who goes by “Wendy” that had me convinced for the longest time that it was brilliant satire. I thought this creature was a man in drag doing a satire of people who cared about celebrities. But it wasn’t satire. It was real.

It’s bad enough to see the kind of programming that caters to people’s basest instincts and most idiotic thoughts, but shouldn’t news shows be held to a higher standard? Technically, they are. They’re dressed up more nicely (most of the time), but when you strip away the nice graphics and the suits of the serious people on the screen, you find that it’s just entertainment. They’re just telling banal, surface-level stories with no context and no meaning in the larger picture.

I’m willing to believe that news used to be important, at least some of the time. I’m no longer certain of that, but I’m willing to assume that it mattered. I can’t see what’s on now as mattering. It’s entertainment. It’s story-telling designed to grab people’s emotions. The people who do the work are very skilled entertainers, but the product we see doesn’t mean anything. It’s just People magazine on steroids. It may be human interest and it may be emotional, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the big picture of life and it doesn’t help us understand our society. It’s not what I think of as “news.”

Last week, we had some tornadoes in my area. As far as I can tell, the only person who was killed was an attractive 16-year-old girl who lived not far from me. I happened to hear one of the local television stations do multiple “news” stories about her death a couple of days later. There was no news. It was just shameless pandering to emotions. The reporter and camera were at the school where the girl had attended, so they were trying to find people to emote on screen for them. There was absolutely nothing to say, but an attractive young white girl died, so this ought to be good for ratings. I’ll bet a lot of people watched it. But it’s not news. (Click the cartoon above for a perfect illustration of what’s standard practice now.)

There’s a scene near the beginning of the 1987 movie, “Broadcast News,” that captures my frustration well. Holly Hunter plays Jane, a dedicated producer who believes in doing important news. She’s speaking to an industry group and bemoaning the fact that many people were turning news into entertainment. She shows her audience — of other television journalists — video that was shown on all the major networks of the Japanese domino championships two years before that. The video is spectacular, as dominoes fall into one another and send waves of other dominoes crashing down, setting off fireworks.

The audience of TV journalists claps and cheers with delight at the footage. Jane has to speak over them to say, “I know it’s good film. I know it’s fun. I like fun. It’s just not news. [The audience continues to applaud.] Well, you’re lucky you love it. You’re going to get a lot more just like it.” An anonymous voice in the audience yells enthusiastically, “Good!”

That’s where we are today. What’s supposed to be news is entertainment — and nobody seems to notice or care anymore.

I used to feel exactly as Jane did. I thought we could find ways to do “important news,” but I’m no longer sure we can. I’m never sure we did. When I think back to what I wrote and edited, I can’t say that I contributed to people’s understanding the world better. I can’t say I did anything that mattered.

More and more, I’m going to back to the insights of Neil Postman from his classic book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” (If you haven’t read it, please do.) Postman argued that broadcast news — and television in particular — isn’t capable of giving us anything complex and important. It’s not capable of giving us ideas.

The worst part is that I fear Emerson’s insight was even more scary. What if we have all of this amazing technology — including the Internet today — and very few of us have anything of substance to say to each other? A few of us crave a connection with others to learn things that we’ve been missing, but the direction of the world is exactly the opposite of that. It’s toward “Idiocracy.”

As someone who was trained in journalism and spent a decade as a reporter, editor and publisher, this is hard for me to say, but my advice is to give up on news. Spend your time on ideas instead. The trivia of the world that’s fading away has little to offer to you. Concern yourself with the ideas you’re going to need to build a new life instead. I have a feeling we’re all going to need those insights soon, because this society truly is amusing itself to its collective death.

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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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