Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions
The opposite of "prestige television" is cable news.
I say this as both a consumer and a participant. For many of us, it's like delivery food, cigarettes, or driving a gas-guzzling car: convenient, kind of fun, kind of bad for you/the world, sometimes worth it, a little addictive, and something you might not admit to indulging in too much. Something you keep saying you’ll quit. In the righteousness of early sobriety, I sometimes asked people to avoid the phrase "news junkie." I’m less offended by its accuracy these days.
For decades, cable news’ main selling point was immediacy. When Americans wanted to know what was happening right now, cable news offered a glimpse into the scene. That is still when it’s at its best—when world events unfold too fast to even develop an intellectual framework for them. When they just turn the cameras on. Anchors reacting in real-time to tragedy or awe—no matter what worldview they bring—can help us develop our national flash-memory for catastrophe. The humanity of someone seeing what we’re seeing and trying to process it can make us feel less alone.
This is unique to television as a medium (n.b. Walter Cronkite tearing up while announcing JFK’s death, the Today Show thrust into trying to make sense of planes hitting the World Trade Center), but cable news’ existing infrastructure allows it to set up for these moments especially well.
That said, that infrastructure shapes what comes out.
Famously, it was the first invasion of Iraq that bounced Ted Turner’s struggling experiment—the Cable News Network—into national and even international consciousness. Three hours into the very first strike by American forces, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told Pentagon reporters, “The best reporting I’ve heard about what has transpired in Baghdad was on CNN.” Gen. Colin Powell and President Turgut Özal of Turkey said they were getting their news from CNN. Viewership skyrocketed, and the stock along with it.
The medium was new, but the reason CNN had such an extraordinarily intimate perspective on the scene was familiar: access journalism.
CNN had been in Baghdad for months prior to the invasion, buttering up the Iraqi government. “There’s no mystery to [CNN’s success],” Ted Turner told Variety. “Since September we have just been more persistent in nagging the Iraqi government to let us put that piece of gear in.” (The “gear”: a phone line that would allow them to bypass the standard switching systems.)
Other networks said the question was not one of persistence but compliance. As NBC’s foreign bureau chief, David Miller, told the LA Times: “They (CNN) took whatever Iraq put out and broadcast it over and over again. They have to do it over and over again because they are a 24-hour operation and they do it to fill up the time.”
The message to Hussein, Miller said, was that CNN was a marvelous propaganda tool. Whenever Hussein had a photo opportunity during the five months leading up to the war, he saw it broadcast over and over on CNN.
A brutal narcissist captivated by how his increasingly delusional pronouncements were transmuted into topics of serious debate, burnished into urgency by sheer repetition? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. For their part, CNN admitted they broadcast Iraqi government footage, “but not without attempting to balance it with anchor commentary, disclaimers, and interview material from U.S. or other non-Iraqi sources.”
It’s the “attempting” that gets me there.
Reading the back coverage of CNN’s rise, at first I didn’t notice, then started to stumble over the repetition of “over and over again” in the quotes and commentary above. The writer in me was annoyed by the laziness of not finding a new way to say the thing we all know. Then I realized: Access journalism is probably as old (or older) than town criers. The prospect of filling twenty-four hours of blank air based on the rather limited number of things in the world worth covering? Making each hour seem a little more interesting than the last? People thought Ted Turner was nuts.
Critics called it “Ted’s Folly,” “24 Hours of Nothing,” and the “Chicken Noodle Network,” jeers that presaged what cable news often is. Background pablum consumed while waiting for something else to happen: your plane to arrive or, maybe, actual news.
Roger Ailes created Fox because he saw an opening in that bland production line: titillation. As Jeff Guo put it in an essay for Vox: “One of his key insights was that most Americans have little interest in the news, which is too abstract, too distant from their everyday lives.” Ailes relied on triggering the anxieties of old white people to keep them engaged (again, familiar now), but a less-remarked on tragedy of Fox News is that 24 hours of anything, including fear, will acclimate you to it. You don’t necessarily feel it less, it becomes a part of what you feel all the time.
My ex-in-laws used to leave Fox News on for twelve hours a day; going about their business while interchangeable smooth-faced anchors talked about “the knock-out game.” They were very kind and generous to me while I was married to their son; I saw them give tens of thousands of dollars to neighbors and to worthy non-profits. But they were terrified of the world. Once, my father-in-law told me he worried that their second-floor Park Avenue pied-à-terre was too low to the street, “What if the Occupy people decide to break in?”
The repetition of alarming news isn’t always intentional. Treating not-alarming news as alarming isn’t always a conscious choice. The incessant high-pitched squeal comes having to fill those 24 hours. But whether cable news makers mean to or not, saying something over and over again gives it weight, turns access into authority, and slowly corrodes any real distinction between truth and narrative.
That cable news is such a corrupting force is an easy criticism for “news junkies” to make. The insight I think I can offer is that many people who work at cable news channels don’t see their jobs as dealers of a toxic substance. How could they sustain the effort to do their objectively taxing jobs if they did? You and I or the casual viewer look at cable news and see a desert wasteland; many of those who work in cable news think about all those individual grains of sand they need to shovel into view.
The urgency is overwhelming. Sometimes they make terrible decisions. Sometimes they even put me on the air. You can critique their decision to work in a slaughterhouse, but we all have to work somewhere.
All this is to say that I’ve been appearing a lot on News Nation lately, a striving right-ish wing outlet where my every appearance comes with flickers of rage at what the anchor just said. I do it to keep my TV muscles engaged. I would admit that I am doing it for exposure, but how many people who watch News Nation will follow me here? I mainly do it because old friends work there—refugees from shows and networks you probably have watched, you probably cheered for.
Purity is a luxury no one can afford. Do what you can, forgive others who can’t do what you do.
Have a nice weekend.
Debris field/BlueSky round-up:
Not coincidentally, my solo-ish podcast (Open Mike Eagle is my co-host of the month) has had a lot of talk about hustle culture. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Become a patron here.
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