The great American curmudgeon, HL Mencken, once quipped: “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”
But to update it to our times, we’d have to take out newspaper and plug in “the 24-hour news cycle.” It works, doesn’t it? In fact, in our age of 24-hour news cycles and instantaneous bloviating via social media, newspapers are one of the sources of sanity in our ever crazier world.
This occurred to me in the aftermath of the great anti-climax known as the Mueller Report.
The “media” has breathlessly reported not only all the genuine scoops and news stories that have fallen like so much ash from a conflagration, but also this sense of some impending cataclysm. Ah, those heady days of pee tapes and porn star payoffs! It did so seem like it all had to come crashing down, didn’t it?
Yet so much of what we have obsessed over was filler — sawdust in the hot dog. Slow rolling coups? Remember that? Trump’s ascendance was all supposed to be a Kremlin plot, but it turns out we are still the Keystone Cops when it comes to politics. The media did report solid news, but it was the cable channels that led us to believe what it all meant — the end of Trump! And they were dead wrong. We can rely on the main street media to report what is happening. We cannot, however, let them tell us what it means.
So now might be a good time to get back to remembering that while the Fourth Estate is an essential part of our democracy, and not the enemy of the people, the 24-hour news cycle is the enemy of democracy. It is the enemy of the thoughtfulness required of citizens to make a republic function.
Frankly, I think cable news networks in particular went so overboard concocting impeachable offenses — almost to the point of hystericizing the news — because they gave Trump such a pass during the 2016 election and, once elected, tried to make up for it retroactively by hyperactively reporting every salacious detail, moronic malaprops, or outright demagoguery.
So let us now reaffirm that MSNBC, CNN, Jim Acosta, Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher and Steve Colbert and others are not part of the resistance. They are network and media entertainers who live or die based on ratings. Confusing their media/corporate role with resistance is to liberals what the right-wing media has done with Trump: mistaking the media celebrity for a political messiah.
The main stream media cable-news helped lead us to war in Iraq under false intelligence; they are parroting the administration’s line of Venezuela, as they did the Reagan administration line on Central America in the 80s. Now watch them, especially the New York Times, undermine the Green New Deal with their Chicken Little warnings, and their knocking the “alarming” leftward drift of the Democratic Party as they desperately try to get the liberal rank and file behind some “centrist” in 2020.
But it is not all their fault. I am like Pogo. Mostly the answer is, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”
The reason we can be so dazzled by the baubles of scandal and gossip the media offers is that we live in the “Age of the Bloviator.” As a nation, we seem to have substituted thoughtfulness for moral outrage. And yet the quick draw moral outrage is a signature Trump tactic going all the way back to the 80s when Trump took out full-page ads demanding the deaths of the teenagers framed for the Central Park jogger assault.
And now we know moral outrage is not enough to remove a president who genuinely outrages our moral sensibilities! Who knew politics was so complicated? Yet the more we rush — or let ourselves be stampeded — toward moral outrage, the more we ape Trump’s own tactics. Moral outrage, it turns out, is not the new gold standard by which we judge political events, or even people. Moral outrage is now just a debased alloy — the byproduct of industrial-level opinionating mass-produced by Twitter and Facebook. It is effluvia, the toxic sludge left over as at a coal mine or slaughterhouse.
Social media is not where we go to get informed, nor inform others. It is where we go to get further uniformed, or ill-informed, on the complex issues of the day. Social media is where we go to get triggered into quick draw judgements without thoughtfulness. This affliction lays low on both the left and right. It is the disease eating away the last remnants of our republic. It is not a right-wing malaise.
We no longer communicate, we bloviate. And the more we do, the more we normalize Trump.
The talking heads of cable news and its insatiable 24-hour news cycle led us down a cul-de-sac on Trump and Russia-gate. We cannot let them lead us by the nose into 2020.
You are holding part of the answer in your hands. The rest of the answer just ain’t on TV.
Joe Gannon lives in Northampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.