You really need to have some sense of national and world news to make sense of the politics that control our democracy.
But the fragmented way most Americans seem to get news does not serve the cause of democracy.
There of course has been a long history of biased and slanted and scurrilous journalism. So-called yellow journalism may have incited the Spanish-American War in 1898. The theory is that the battleship Maine was blown up in Cuba due to a boiler room malfunction. But the Hearst Newspapers quickly proclaimed sabotage by Spanish forces (Spain controlled Cuba at the time).
But fast forward to my childhood and young adulthood — 1950s to, say, the 1970s — most of us got our news from the likes of Walter Cronkite on TV (or the Huntley-Brinkley Report or Howard K Smith) and the newspapers. The TV news operations then often fed off the leads of print journalists, who did the leg work and provided more in-depth coverage.
There were weekly news magazines for current events enthusiasts as myself. The two main ones I read were Time and Newsweek. These were not simply publications dedicated to point of view, but to a general audience (sure some will say they had their biases).
All this was mainstream, somewhat homogenized, journalism, seemingly free of bias, except for a general consensus of viewpoint maybe. Sounds contradictory, I realize, but there needs to be some level of consensus in a functioning society or you get, well, what we have now.
Yes, politicians and others of a conservative bent even then saw bias. That’s because they were possibly outside the mainstream at the time.
Television news anchors did have power, however.
Sometime in the early 1960s I read a TV Guide feature that noted David Brinkley could convey an opinion in an otherwise straight reading of the news by a raised eyebrow. In a straight news print story, you just insert some background to add perspective to perhaps questionable or confusing statements. Objective and honest reporting is not mere transcription, it’s a bit of interpretation at times.
No one could seemingly be more straightforward as Cronkite. But even he could no longer repeat the official government line on Vietnam.
After visiting the war zone, at the end of one of his newscasts, he went into the opinion mode and told of what a sad folly it was. Really, the public already knew. He just cemented the deal.
President Lyndon Johnson confided that if the support of Cronkite was lost, there was no hope. That’s not because Cronkite was calling the shots. He just seemed to represent middle America.
(Ironically, and somewhat tragically, Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, would use the support of that middle America, he called the “silent majority”, to prolong the war we were destined to lose — partly due to there being no clear purpose or will or end game).
I’m not sure it was good for journalism for someone identified with reporting news to then express his own opinion, but what was he to do? Ignore the obvious in order to be fair to those who wanted to continue the war?
But, back to the news magazines. I know about when they died (I’m talking the print editions, some survive, kind of, online. It’s not the same). I was receiving cancer treatment, and at times hospitalized around 2007. I was reading the magazines and some paper copies of major newspapers. But right about that time they began to dissappear.
I think readership had declined particularly back to the 1950s with the advent of television. But the digital age with everything seemingly available on your portable phone, which really took off in I guess the late ’90s and 2000, changed everything. And the business model was forced to change.
Today’s journalism landscape with digital is huge. No longer do the big three TV Networks or a few large, influential newspapers rule (well, except the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post do have major influence — the Post is in inner turmoil at the moment, but that’s a new issue I’m not fully up on yet, and in my original post here I referred to the Journal, when I should have written Post).
There is a cornucopia of purported journalism on our phones. But there are no editors or fact checkers for much of it, and a lot of it is pure propaganda disguised as news reporting.
And, to grab eyeballs, many sites on the web present what they call news to a targeted audience, giving them mostly what it’s deemed they want to hear.
Cable TV news also suffers from this. On the reactionary right you have Fox News, but fighting against it you have MSNBC.
And it’s all somewhat overwhelming.
So, as a result, there is an overload of false or misleading information. Many just tune it all out. It was much easier on the average concerned citizen when it was just Uncle Walter and the daily paper.
And, used to be those who had no interest in current events went upon their happy way. But now that seemingly everyone lives on their portable phones that spew out a jumble of news, opinion, partisan and even foreign propaganda, and entertainment all mixed together in a stew of sorts, the masses are easily incited.
Witness the attack on the capitol.
Witness the election and possible second election of a man who openly calls for and works for the destruction of our democracy.
Ok, so what to do?
As everyday, but responsible citizens, we need to focus on fact and tune out the noise.
The powers that be in journalism need to go lighter on the sideshow. Constantly taking the bait and responding to the irresponsible and often incoherent nonsense of the MAGA movement seems only to strengthen it, kind of like the show business adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Now that troublesome dictator-loving presidential candidate was right that time he proclaimed “there’s good people on both sides”. Those good people on both sides could straighten things out, but for the supposed need by some purveyors of information to cater to the lowest common denominator.
We as responsible citizens need to be more particular about sorting through our news sources.
Also, I’ve found that discussing politics with uninformed people is futile, a pure waste of time.
I’m all in support of democracy, but admit its Achilles’ heal is that the willfully ill-informed have potentially equal power as responsible citizens. It’s just kind of an inevitable risk in our system.
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In my memory, public opinion was as much divided in the depths of the Vietnam War as today, but the reach and power of digital magnifies everything. Time passes, things change. We may get over it.
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I didn’t address the threat of deep fakes in news created via artificial intelligence. The only safeguard to that may be essentially the same technology used to detect the fakes.
Posted by Tony Walther 
Tony Walther's Weblog 