Prophet Needed
The news business needs disrupting.
The Americans, the critically-acclaimed, six-season 1980s Cold War spy drama from FX about two Soviet KGB agents living as Americans in suburban Washington, DC, remains the best television show I’ve ever seen. It was a terrific spy show, but its transcendence came from a deeper place. What it was really about was life, family, love, and the intersection of role-play and reality to each.
During one season three episode, Stan Beeman, an FBI agent, played by Noah Emmerich, is asked about his backstory — three years undercover with white supremacists — by another agent.
“What did it take to fool them?”
“Telling them what they wanted to hear over and over and over again.”
“That’s it?”
“People love hearing how right they are.”
The news business has turned that reality into a wildly successful business model. Fox News proved that confirming its customers’ priors is very profitable business. Today, it’s the way the news business is done pretty much across-the-board. And very successfully, too.
In 1953, the head of GM famously (sort of) said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” In this instance, what’s good for the news business is exceedingly bad for America.
The news business desperately needs disrupting. It may not be possible to do it in these outraged and polarized times. It may be too broken. America may be too broken. But, if it is to happen, it will take a very particular type of unicorn to do it. This unicorn will have to be a person — indeed, a prophet. That’s the subject of this week’s TBL.
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Prophet Needed
It was a different time.
Television was three channels for three networks when I was a kid in the 1960s. There was nothing like DVR or streaming services, so appointment viewing was required. There were not many niche programs and no niche networks or platforms. I watched Batman in prime time at night and talked about it the next day with my friends.
Television news was a big deal, too.
The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” During my childhood, we thought television news simply delivered the facts. Uniform facts.
My family watched The CBS Evening News at 6:30 p.m. After dinner (we called it “supper”). The anchor was an avuncular old school journalist from Kansas City with a clipped mustache: Walter Cronkite. David Halberstam called him “the most significant journalist of the second half of the twentieth century.”
During his nineteen years as the nightly news anchor, Cronkite also led CBS’s coverage of big events, such as the Kennedy assassination, major-party political conventions, and every NASA space shot, from Mercury to the Apollo moon landings. He was on the air seemingly non-stop during them.
I had no idea what his political convictions were.
He was “the avatar of objectivity,” per Richard Perloff of Cleveland State. His biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, concluded: “Cronkite was the ultimate reliable source.”
And he was.
“Our job is only to hold up the mirror – to tell and show the public what has happened,” Cronkite said. He closed every edition of “the news” with his trademark send-off: “And that's the way it is,” followed by the date of the broadcast.
And we believed him.
The war in Vietnam was also a big part of my childhood, in no small measure due to the news. It was the first “living-room war.”
In November 1967, Gen. William Westmoreland, then the U.S. commander in Vietnam, still proclaimed, “The enemy’s hopes are bankrupt.”
However, on January 30, 1968, during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong launched a surprise attack on more than a hundred cities and towns in South Vietnam during a ceasefire.
Cronkite responded to this news by going to Vietnam to decide for himself what was going on. He performed old school, shoe leather reporting. The result was a one-hour news special: “Report from Vietnam,” broadcast in prime time on February 27.
With that show, Cronkite – just barely – stopped being the down-the-middle, quasi-official voice-over on the newsreel of American public life and put his finger on the scale, ever so slightly.
President Lyndon Johnson is said to have watched and lamented, “If I have lost Cronkite, I have lost America.” Thirty-three days later, Johnson announced he would not run for re-election.
It was a very different time.
Almost 30 million people (about 14% of the U.S. population) tuned in to watch Cronkite every night. Fewer than five million (about 1.5%) watch Norah O’Donnell now.
During his tenure, Americans’ trust in news media exceeded 70 percent. Cronkite was “the most trusted public figure in America.”
Today, at 34 percent, Americans’ trust in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” is just two points higher than the lowest that Gallup has ever recorded (during the 2016 presidential campaign). Only seven percent of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media, and 27 percent have “a fair amount.” Meanwhile, 28 percent of U.S. adults say they do not have very much confidence and 38 percent have none in newspapers, TV, and radio.
Too many media types and organizations make no real pretense of being fair. Others make the claim but have difficulty living up to it, especially when their side is in the wrong or in trouble.
To be fair, the news business is different today. Unlike broadcast networks, cable news doesn’t need to attract the masses. They merely need to establish a loyal niche audience.
People love hearing how right they are.
Print media has also changed.
Under its old business model (back when it had lots of advertisers), The New York Times could tell advertisers to pound sand. Today, the Times needs its subscribers (old, rich, liberal, and white) and staff (extremely progressive), and must cater to them. And expand its base by virtue-signaling and trolling the opposition: “Imagining Harry Potter Without Its Creator.”
Today, the journalistic standard is no longer objectivity, or even fairness. Today’s news focuses instead on such things as “moral clarity” and “false equivalence.”
That said, nobody is objective. Not really. Fairness is barely a reasonable goal. And in today’s media landscape, even trying makes no economic sense.
Margaret Sullivan, the former Times public editor, recounted in her recent book that, after receiving anti-media earfuls during a post-2016-election listening tour of Republican districts, “I couldn’t help but recognize that when it came to acknowledging basic truths, huge swaths of America were very far gone.”
She’s entirely correct about that.
What she failed to realize was that there are also plenty of examples in the other direction and it isn’t “bothsidesism” to point that out. For example, Sullivan (in the book) accused former Vice President Mike Pence of “trying to sow doubt” about the January 6 riots during an October 2021 Fox News interview with Sean Hannity, stating that “the vice president downplayed the insurrection as merely ‘one day in January.’”
What did Pence say?
“January 6 was a tragic day in the history of our Capitol building. But thanks to the efforts of Capitol Hill police, federal officials, the Capitol was secured. We finished our work.”
Pence then started spinning for the benefit of his Fox News audience: “I know the media wants to distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January. They want to use that one day to try and demean the…character and intentions of 74 million Americans.”
He’s sucking up and it’s classic political diversion, but there’s no doubt-sowing. Given his location and audience, it isn’t crazy to say Pence was brave.
Former Fox News reporter Chris Stirewalt, fired after his Decision Desk correctly called the 2020 presidential race in Arizona for Joe Biden early and stood by it under intense pressure, got it right in his analysis, too.
“Just at the exact moment where it would have been most important for journalists to maintain the highest possible standards for objectivity, big-time news dove in the mud with Trump, where he had home field advantage.”
Fox News won’t tell you that Donald Trump is playing fast and loose with the facts while MSNBC will blame Trump for everything.
The reverse is also true.
MSNBC won’t tell you that Joe Biden has lost at least a yard off his fastball while Fox News will suggest he needs to be placed in a convalecent home.
Critics like Jon Stewart have wondered what it would look like to have a “Roger Ailes of veracity” — a network head brilliant at producing high-quality entertainment, but whose guiding principle was not conservative politics but the most important practical issues confronting the country.
That ship has sailed. Those “important practical issues” seem always to be considered from a partisan point of view.
The news business is broken and in desperate need of disruption. We need a uniform set of facts to impose our values upon and argue about.
It’s not going to happen.
Good government is bad TV. Nobody wants to watch competency, cooperation, and decency. Neil Postman is still right, more than 25 years on. A cable news outlet that questions the priors of their viewers or hints that their favored avatars in the culture wars are less than perfect, risks its viewers leaving for a competitor that more devotedly tells them what they want to hear.
It’s amazing how much is made telling people how right they are.
We want the “bad guys” punished, too. For example, Twitter has proven that it has an unmatched anti-misinformation program. It banned (“suspended”) the Babylon Bee. For satire.
Of course, misinformation and propaganda are exceedingly effective. That’s why they’re seemingly everywhere. “Everyone’s got a mortgage to pay.”
According to an NBC News poll last week, 80 percent of Americans – Democrats and Republicans alike – believe the political opposition poses a threat that, if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it. Nearly everybody recognizes that situation to be dangerous and untenable but are so convinced of their own rightness that they feel justified in their hatred.
And they don’t think it’s close.
That’s why we need a unicorn – a wildly entertaining true prophet people of all sorts and on all sides will want to watch and, more importantly, listen to. A prophet who isn’t in the news business because today’s news-watchers won’t stand to see their team criticized. A prophet who is brilliant at producing high-quality entertainment, but whose guiding principle is finding the truth about and around the most important practical issues confronting the country.
It will have to be someone who is news-adjacent.
Like Jon Stewart but not like Jon Stewart. Stewart is an incredible talent, but he takes predicable positions.
He’s a one-sided partisan. They all are: Gutfield, Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel, Oliver, Noah, Meyers, and Bee (now canceled).
There is misinformation, corruption, nonsense, and comedy gold everywhere and on all sides. It isn’t often proportional, but it’s always there.
We need someone willing to skewer everybody. Ask tough questions of everybody. Entertain everybody.
Put most simply, in a Christian context at least, prophecy is a public performance that undermines the political powers and, instead, offers a vision of the world that challenges the then-current dominant realities. If it’s biting and funny (as in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal), so much the better. Finding such a prophet might help us, at least, find a uniform set of facts.
Oh, how we need that right now.
Totally Worth It
Did you know that we’re further removed in time from Purple Rain than Purple Rain was from Meet the Beatles?
Feel free to contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome.
This is the best thing I read this week. The wildest. The smartest. The stupidest, unless it was this. The funniest. The cutest. The nerdiest. The wisest. The most important. Here is a brilliant four-minute podcast on why we like the music we like. $1.7 million for a toilet – you should be able to guess where. When reinventing the wheel is a good thing. If you want to understand crypto and have fun doing it, read this (it’s worth giving Bloomberg your email for it). Sarcastic fringeheads. Grab the popcorn. Apostasy. Of course they did. What could go wrong? You be the ump.
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The average annual financial report has ballooned from 15,000 words in 1997 to more than 40,000 words in recent years. And much of that verbiage is boilerplate, added by lawyers trying to protect against the you-never-told-us-this-could-happen lawsuits from shareholders.
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I appeared with Peter Lazaroff on his excellent podcast this week. Listen here.
The TBL Spotify playlist, made up of the songs featured here, now includes more than 235 songs and about 17 hours of great music. I urge you to listen in, sing along, and turn up the volume.
Benediction
Ashley McBryde, a wonderful “accidental preacher,” offers a lovely “last call benediction” this week that is also a stirring prophetic word.
God sets His table in the wilderness, offers His table of provision, and invites all to share in His hospitality. We are all beggars at that banquet, grateful to get “somethin’ warm to eat.”
Please give this song and Ashley’s story (on both sides of the tune) a listen. You won’t regret it.
Amen.
Thanks for reading.
Issue 127 (October 28, 2022)
I had to share. It's (to me) the best TBL I've read. Thank you for championing a better path.
Brilliantly written, thank you!
It is a misconception that the media have ever been objective, but what we are currently witnessing has little to do with journalism and a lot to do with propaganda and gaslighting.
https://changeandevolve.substack.com/p/special-issue-26