So the other day I said a thing about how I felt like a line could be drawn between antis, and the rise of 24-hour news networks. Iâve given that thought some time to bubble to see what, exactly, my brain meant by that statement, and hereâs what Iâve got:
When I was a kid (back in Ye Olde 1990s), we had three major news stations in my town: Channel 12, Channel 24, and Channel 35. These corresponded to NBC, ABC, and CBS, but I donât remember which one was which so donât ask me. Anywayâyou had a half hour of news at 8 or 9 am (depending on which station you watched), an hourlong program at noon in which half the program was stuff like âhere are todayâs beach closures and some recipes and also if youâre looking for stuff to do with the kids this weekend here are local promotions,â and half an hour at either 5, 5:30, or 6 (again, depending on which channel you watched). One of the three stations also did a half-hour capper at 10pm. So unless you were watching all three stations, and picking the news every single time, the max amount of news you were going to get was like an hour and a half. If you wanted more news than that, you read the newspaper. When my mom was a kid (back in Ye Olde 1960s), this would have seemed like an inordinate amount of newsâfor her, it was half an hour at 6pm and ten minutes at 10pm and then the station (there was only one station that did the news) played the National Anthem and went off the air until 6am, at which time you might get like ⊠the weather and a traffic report.
For anything else, you read the newspaper.
Now with only half an hour to present a whole lot of news, what are you going to do? You are going to stick to the facts. You donât have a choice. You have a very short time to fit a whole lot of information. âNotre Dame cathedral caught on fire today. French firefighters are working to get the flames under control, and authorities in charge of the cathedral are doing their best to remove relics, paintings, and other holy objects while itâs still possible. French President Mr. Somebody addressed the nation and stated every attempt to save the building, and to rebuild the damage, will be made. In local news ⊠â And thatâs it! If you want more information, youâve got to wait for the newspaper in the morning, and youâre going to have to get a copy of the New York Times or USA Today, because the local paper will only have a blurb, and that blurb will mostly cover what you just heard!
But then the news changed.
By the time I was a teenager, the non-cable news looked like this: All three channels had a morning show that started at 5 or 6 am (depending on your station) and ran until 8 or 9 (depending on your station). The station that ended at 8am then had a half-hour morning news show. The mid-day news at 11 or 12 was still an hour. Channel 35 did a half-hour news segment at 5 and another at 5:30, back to back. The other two stations simply did an hourlong segment. And then one station did half an hour at 10:30, and the other two did hourlong segments at 10pm.
What do you do with that much time? Well, you expand. Yes, you can fit more news, but you can also fit more about the news. âNotre Dame cathedral in Paris went up in flames today. The fire began in the famous historic bell tower, and spread to the roof. At this time, portions of the roof appear to have caved in, and there are concerns about the integrity of the medieval stonework in the cathedral walls. French firefighters have been working since 8am Paris time to get the flames under control, and authorities in charge of the cathedral are doing their best to remove relics, paintings, and other holy objects while itâs still possible. Some firefighters are also helping with this project, as portions of the building have become too unsafe to enter. French President Mr. Somebody addressed the nation late this evening and stated every attempt to save the building, and to rebuild the damage, will be made. Of the cathedral itself, Somebody said, âOur Lady has weathered worse troubles than this. Paris as a city, and France as a nation, will overcome.â In local news ⊠â
Still facts, but a few more facts. At this point the internet as a public thing is just past its infancy, and in theory you could go look up some stuff on, like, AOL, maybe, about what was happening.
(Nina, you were talking about antis ⊠?)
(Yes, I was. Bear with me.)
But at this point you also saw the rise of Fox News and CNN.
Now up to this point, I could trust the news. That is important to know. âNina, American news is full of propagandaââ Listen, youâre not wrong, but the point is, if Scott Brennan told me Notre Dame cathedral was on fire and priests were trying to remove the holy relics, I could safely assume Notre Dame cathedral was on fire and priests were trying to remove the holy relics. If Channel 24 told me âthe blizzard of the centuryâ had occurred the night before, I could look out the window of my snowed-in house and go âyeah, that seems legit.â
I grew up, in other words, in a world in which facts were facts. We didnât waffle or wring our hands over whether or not Notre Dame was on fire. And this allowed me to take a similar approach to fiction: it is a fact that murder is wrong, and knowing this, I can read a book in which someone commits murder for very good reasons, but still know they did something wrong.
But now you have 24 hours of news to fill.
No matter how you pad it, no matter how many voice clips you play or retrospectives you do, you cannot find enough news in the world to fill 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You just canât.
So they started adding âopinion pieces.â
Notre Dame is on fireâis it worth saving? Notre Dame is on fireâbut is it as big a catastrophe as itâs made out to be? Notre Dame is on fireâbut France has been steadily calling themselves a secular nation, so is this the punishment of G-d? Notre Dame is on fireâ
Yep. You saw it, I saw it, we all saw it. But as the âopinion piecesâ slowly took over the regular news and stopped being called âopinion piecesâ and started being called âprograms,â it became less and less clear what was and wasnât fact.
Now obviously Notre Dame is on fire. But now we have to ask ourselves: is it worth it to save it or not? Is the financial cost outweighed by the history? Will those answers change depending on how bad the damage becomes? And you, lonely elderly person in your chair whose predominant socialization these days is at church, how does this make you feel about French people? These are questions that once would have been asked of the church caretakers and the French government. Now every single person is being asked to think about them, without being provided all of the context that is available to the church caretakers and the French government. And along the way, you get these nice, nasty little bits of prejudice and slanted thinking and bias sneaked in.
I told you Iâd come back to antis. And here we are.
The vast majority of antis are very young. They grew up in a world where those âprogramsâ were the norm. They were not provided with a cultural basis of âthese are the facts.â They were provided a basis of âhere is what I think about the facts.â They were provided a basis of, as Mr. Banks said in Mary Poppins, âkindly do not cloud the matter with facts.â
There are no facts! Who fucking cares! An anti whoâs 15 years old today was eleven years old when we were introduced to âalternative factsâ! Is it wrong for a 27-year-old man to pursue a relationship with a 13-year-old girl? Depends on which news channel, and which presenter, you ask!
They literally grew up in a world in which critical thinking was discouraged. Once upon a time, you would have seen on TV that Notre Dame was on fire, and at dinnerâor whatever your family did for together timeâyou might say things like âgoing to be expensive to fix that, I wonder what theyâll do,â but you wouldnât have been hit with six presenters telling you exactly why Notre Dame should/shouldnât be rebuilt. And donât forgetâeven if you, personally, do not watch the news (or read it on the internet, which is just as bad, because everybodyâs after those elusive advertising clicks, everybody needs the âscoopâ two seconds before it happens), you know people who do. You hear their opinions and their hot takes and their retellings all around you. And those opinions and hot takes and retellings will be colored by which âprogramâ that person saw first.
Watch the first thirty seconds of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn2RjahTi3M
Walter Cronkite, a legendary news anchor, giving his opinion on Vietnam. You will notice that he states, very clearly: âit seems very clear to this reporter.â This is Cronkiteâs opinion, nothing more, and he makes it clear that he is speaking only for himself.
Now skip to approximately 1:05, and watch him report the Kennedy assassination. You can see heâs emotional, but also keeping it under wraps as best he can because he has An Important Job To Do, and that job is twofold: to deliver the news accurately and concisely, and to keep the American public calm (you can see this when he hurriedly says Johnson is probably taking the oath to become President; a missing VP would be a crisis at this moment). This is a man whoâs just found out the most beloved president in modern times is dead. And not just deadâmurdered. Itâs not like Kennedy had a heart attack, his damn head was blown off. This news is still coming in so quickly that you can see him glancing off the screen to get fresh reports. Heâs one of the first to receive this absolute blowâand heâs still holding it together, barely wavering. (When I was a kid, this role would go to Dan Rather. He was no Cronkite, but he tried.)
Where is that kind of rock for todayâs teens? Imagineâheaven forbid, in the state our countryâs in right nowâthat tomorrow we get the news Biden was shot.
How would we get that message?
Would it be delivered by an even-keeled, just-the-facts reporter like Cronkite? Or would we get it from a bunch of half-hysterical articles and crisismongering âprogramsâ? And would it be delivered to us straight, like Cronkite did, or would it be buried in three daysâ worth of opinions on his âlegacyâ and policies and What This Means For America?
Now: how are you supposed to build any kind of strong convictions and moral compass on a world like that? Where anything can be true if enough people have an âopinionâ on it? Where the facts get immediately buried in a wave of bullshit?
Antis are reacting to a world of âopinionsâ and âprogramsâ being thrown at them 24/7 by trying to create a world they can control, where there are in fact things that are true, in a world that has actively refused them the opportunity to learn how to parse and process facts. And so what theyâve come up with is this grossly distorted version of facts, because gross distortions of facts are all they know. Itâs all theyâve ever seen. Theyâre perpetuating a system they donât even realize theyâre part of, because they never experienced life before it existed.
Theyâre not lying when they say they were heavily influenced by fiction because the bounds between fact and fiction have been actively erased. On purpose. And itâs difficult to grok that, if you grew up in a world where you didnât have to go seek out photographic evidence to be absolutely certain that Notre Dame was, indeed, on fire.
So what we need to be doing, first and foremost, is rebuilding that wall of facts, that line of truth. Otherwise, what weâre going to see is more of this, but getting worse daily.
We set them up for this, and now weâre paying the price for it.
