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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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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