9 ms·

The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The

• barbazoo 3y ago
  > 7 PM - 8 PM 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 :)
  • Izkata 3y ago
    Where I was the US, 7pm - 9pm was prime entertainment time, and the news would start at 9pm or 10pm depending on the channel (which I think was partially so TV would become boring to kids right around when they should go to bed). Don't remember how long it ran, though my guess would be an hour before the late-night shows would begin.
    • barbazoo 3y ago
      Interesting how it's different everywhere. Even today, most movies start at 20:15 it seems: https://www.tvtoday.de/tv-programm/ https://www.tvtoday.de/tv-programm/
      • mikub 3y ago
        As far as I'm aware the 20:15 thing here in germany is because nobody want's to compete with the "Tagesschau". In other countrys where I lived all the channels would start their movies whenever they want(7pm, 9pm or such strange times), as a german I found that pretty irritating, who could live like that? It's pure anarchy. :)
    • ghaff 3y ago
      As I recall in the US, there was typically a post-primetime local news broadcast. The network news was pre-primetime (and it may have been accompanied with a local news slot beforehand).
    • vidanay 3y ago
      In Chicago, there was only a single news broadcast that _wasn't_ at 10pm and that was Channel 9. It was part of their marketing to have the news at 9 (channel 9, news at 9). In the mid-late 80's when Fox came online, they copied the 9 o'clock news.
• jwells89 3y ago
  > 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. 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.
  • taude 3y ago
    Even in the early 90s news started shifting towards our modern incarnation. CNN was considered hard news in the 80s, but that changed around the time of the Persian Gulf war and Wolf Blitzer becoming the Scud-Stud, and all the other shows like Cross-Fire becoming news-er-tainment (or whatever the proper industry term is), etc...
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > CNN was considered hard news in the 80s 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.
      • cbsmith 3y ago
        Oh, that goes way back before CNN and cable, or even TV. 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/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-divided-dial/ The change has been systemic, and that change shaped CNN more than the other way around.
      • xattt 3y ago
        An oft-forgotten movie is the Network (1976) that predicts the rise of activist news hosts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
• chmod600 3y ago
  "with the same care and thoughtfulness that goes into rooting for your favorite NFL team" 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).
  • tracker1 3y ago
    I think most of us realise that "our side" is just as likely as the other side... We all recognize the problem, it's just that we differ on what we believe are ideal solutions. In the end, the breakdown of actual compromise on most issues is the result and it's bad for anyone without the pocketbook to overcome the issue, politically speaking. 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.
    • gnarlynarwhal42 3y ago
      i agree 100%, i feel like in the venn diagram of politics there is a lot of overlap but its just more fun/engaging/dopamine to focus on the outside crescents i guess... which serves the divide/conquer goals of the establishment.
• RestlessAPI 3y ago
  Cable TV and Internet are tools. They are technologies. They are not people. 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.
• tivert 3y ago
  > The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. The media has figured out that America is the ultimate reality TV show and they present it as such. > 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 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.
  • flyinghamster 3y ago
    Social media and its manipulation have amplified the problem vastly, and what makes it even worse is the consolidation of ownership. Nothing like turning on an ABC (owned by Disney) news program and getting ten minutes of self-referential Disney news.
    • tivert 3y ago
      I think the internet and social media's effects have been different than television. Like television, it encourages even shorter attention spans and even more superficial engagement with things. Unlike television, it tends towards anger and outrage (not entertainment) and encourages more fragmentation and tribalism.
  • mikhailfranco 3y ago
    "... 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." The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
• TheBlight 3y ago
  I'd argue the biggest problem is the leveraging of all forms of mass media to psychologically manipulate the public.
  • tracker1 3y ago
    I have to agree, and some have even said the quiet parts out loud... and that there wasn't broad-spread outcry is somewhat terrifying to me. I don't care what side you're on, I disagree with many on most things. This is frankly a terrifying, and somewhat delusional, precedent. https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/ https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
  • benjaminsky2 3y ago
    Not to mention that they all use or amplify the exact same talking points at the exact same time.
• throw0101b 3y ago
  > Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this. 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/Tabloid_journalism * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_magazine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_magazine * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_reporting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_reporting
  • kube-system 3y ago
    Both, really. As technology has created new and broader reaching mediums, the people operating those mediums have changed their target audience to support their existence.
    • gnarlynarwhal42 3y ago
      as human nature is more understood, human nature adapts to better exploit^Wcater to human nature
  • tootie 3y ago
    There is more and better quality news available now than ever in history and people flock to the crappiest options because they can't get enough. It's demand.
    • selectodude 3y ago
• Jeema101 3y ago
  A lot of it isn't actually news at all: it's news entertainment. 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.
  • jewayne 3y ago
    You have to admit, Missing White Woman is a pretty classic storyline. Especially when the husband is the villain!
  • clsec 3y ago
    I can't even count the number of times Taylor Swift and her concert tour have been on the news in the past two weeks.
    • lotsofpulp 3y ago
      I assume Taylor Swift’s marketing machine is in full gear to distract from her getting into a relationship with a racist.
  • voussoir 3y ago
    To corroborate your comparison between news and WWE, here's a list of "slams" and "blasts" headlines I put together recently :) https://voussoir.net/writing/slamming_and_blasting https://voussoir.net/writing/slamming_and_blasting
• digging 3y ago
  Isn't it remarkable how healthy and wise our society was before 24-hour news. Nowadays we have newfangled problems like "populism", "anger", "Nazis" - say, where does that name even come from?
  • bcoates 3y ago
    No, we have a problem with the news selling those fictional things as real. Turn off CNN or OAN wherever you get your firehose of algorithmically generated nonsense from and they magically go away.
    • zer0zzz 3y ago
      Add Apple News and any bundled phone news app to that list.
    • ChatGTP 3y ago
      The issue is these things become real when the populists get voted in. So it’s not just a fantasy.
    • digging 3y ago
      This is a truly unhinged take. Maybe you need to be reading more news.
  • ToDougie 3y ago
    I love this comment. Maybe we wouldn't be in such a quagmire if previous generations had paid a little more attention to current events.
• basch 3y ago
  Cable News may have boiled it down to its essence, but the problem transcends tv. The same problem exists in writing, its just more spread out. 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 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.
  • jspiral 3y ago
    yes, a weekly recap of the big stories from 10 years ago this week and what ultimately came of those topics would be fascinating context
  • human_person 3y ago
    I think the amount of news we expose ourselves to should correlate more with the closeness of the events (or inversely with their distance from us). We can actually have an impact on events in our local community. And in a lot of ways what is immediately around us when we walk out the front door has a more impact than anything else on how we experience the world. News from far away is just second hand sadness.
• ashton314 3y ago
  Neil Postman articulates this point in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and cites Marshal McLuhan’s adage, “the medium is the message”: TV is entertaining and context-free. News over TV will adopt the shape of the medium. I did a little write-up after reading AOtD for a TL;DR of the book: https://lambdaland.org/posts/personal/2020-06-07-amusing-ourselves-to-death/ https://lambdaland.org/posts/personal/2020-06-07-amusing-our... (Though you really should read the book and not my dumb little write-up.)
  • trgn 3y ago
    Postman is the sort of public intellectual no longer exist. Classically educated and proud of it, conservative in spirit, tolerant in action. He also made digestible a lot of the work from 60s70s academia on these topics. 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.
• davidw 3y ago
  I started following Jay Rosen on Twitter and that's something he often talks about. Coverage is like a horse race, that talks about the odds, not the consequences of someone getting elected.
• zingababba 3y ago
  The problem is speed of information eroding our sense-making coupled with the dominant linguistic framework of economics which reduces communication to zero-sum competition. To pine for any kind of quaint return is missing the point entirely. The only way through is forward and out.
• nathancahill 3y ago
  My grandparents managed to maintain this way of watching news. The TV was off the entire day. They would turn it on at 8pm after dinner for the local/national news report, and turn it off when it finished. It's possible to do but it takes discipline and intention.
• runlaszlorun 3y ago
  Great description.
• damnesian 3y ago
  Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine would be the one switch to flip to undo a lot of this very destructive mess. Of course all of the media giants would throw all the lawyers at it. Now that they know how incredibly lucrative news-as-entertainment is. But it's what must be done to turn this problem around and get a handle on it.
  • DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
    Literally illegal for certain with anything non-broadcast about with about 90% certainty for broadcast. It’s such a blatant violation of the first amendment it’s never going to happen.
    • jgeada 3y ago
      America's notion of freedom of speech was designed at time when we thought humans would prefer truth over "truthiness". Turns out none of that was true, or only true for a small subset of the population. No other country runs with our rules of "freedom of speech == freedom of consequences" (particularly for the rich). But then, most of the West is running into similar problems with the news. 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)
      • SllX 3y ago
        Not designed: emerged. Our notions of free speech emerged in a world where publishing was under British law a licensed industry, and the operation of an illegal printing press was a crime which could be punished, where there were parts of the New World where the only legal printing the press could be used for was for the Bible and where there were other parts of the New World where the British Crown retained the rights to the King James Edition of the Bible and it was illegal to print in America. 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.
• tootie 3y ago
  "Cable TV and the internet are to blame for this" 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. People talk about media or corporations or government like they're from some alternate dimension or alien species. They're run by the exact same human beings that exist in your daily life. Most people act out of self-interest and are subject to bias. Media didn't invent it, it's an extension of human nature.
• nonethewiser 3y ago
  > The single biggest problem with America today is the presentation and consumption of national news, political commentary and public policy as entertainment. 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.
• cbsmith 3y ago
  > 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. 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.
• tomjen3 3y ago
  I don't think you can really say anything is to blame for this: people follow incentives and the incentives are to yell higher and higher to be heard over all the noise of everybody else and to create the most insane headlines to be hear over all the other insane headlines. 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.
  • zer0zzz 3y ago
    I totally agree with this. Except when it comes to new platforms and media of the likes of tech we are collectively much more willing to examine and be critical of our own industry even on HN. However IMHO the thing that makes the news industry so scummy is that these are the people that still control most of the narratives people read about and they seem to almost never be self critical at all and if they were then Jon Stewart wouldn’t still have a show getting laughs off of this truth.
• iancmceachern 3y ago
  True facts. 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
• Accujack 3y ago
  >I don't know what could be done about it. 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?
• raxxorraxor 3y ago
  True that the US seems to have its own "quality" of news, but most western countries don't fare better. On the contrary, the less sensationell style often makes you believe the news to be more reliable, but in essence it never truly is.