Journalism Review

I was reflecting, not for the first time, that what we call the "news" sites, descendants of newspapers, are actually sites that tell us right-up-to-the-minute what to think about the news. The more national and important they are (WaPo, NYT) the more this is true. This is clearly an important service to many people. The WaPo report on the new CEO of Twitter could have been written a few months ago with only minor modifications such as putting a person's name in the slot. It is not framed as a directive of what you should think but as a reassurance: yes, what you already thought about this was just about right.  We very smart people at the Top Outlets might have a few fun twists and additions, but you believe the right things, yes.  You know who to hate. Sometimes we will let you know early on who is going out of fashion, so that you don't say something foolish in public about them.  Come back tomorrow and we will top you up again.

Growing up in New Hampshire with William Loeb's Union Leader I thought this was just normal for sections of a newspaper to do this. Loeb was vindictive and more anti-liberal than he was conservative, though he published a number of conservative columnists. Every other paper in the state, especially the Concord Monitor (my cousin became editor) was almost reflexively opposite in politics, also telling you what to think about what was happening in Washington and Boston. Yet in the main, all of them mostly did just report news about crime, and garden clubs, and school awards, and sports. Something of the journalistic ideal seemed to show through, and I imagine it was the same in your towns as well.

It does seem that no topic is allowed to just be news anymore, and someone feels the need to inject their national or overall cultural spin into whatever is put forward. The sports and crime stories are now suffused with opinions outside the actual news.  I haven't seen the garden club news take a dive yet, but there was a scandal a couple of years ago about a knitting club that deteriorated into acrimony and accusations about not being anti-racist enough. There is Jonathan Haidt's evidence that the deterioration in mental health in teenagers, peaking in 2014 and not relenting since has to do with the amount of social media time they invest. My own guess is that it is the relentlessness of the cultural policing, interpenetrating the everyday social development, that creates the anxiety.  There is no escape for these children. If someone insults me on social media I can shrug, because I have a whole world to shrug in where that doesn't matter.  They have no such world. (Which is why it is important for them to be shoved into encouraged to participate in actual face-to-face socialising groups, in sports, or at church, or anime club or whatever. They need a world with fresh air.)

Tangential but related: When I see the words "in the Age of Trump" I stop reading. The person has nothing to say.

I wondered where the break point was between the news of my childhood and the current news aquarium. We talk a lot about how things have changed and whole books have been written about how and why.  Well, maybe.  But it put me in mind of something earlier.

 “Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” – fictional character Miss Hardcastle, from That Hideous Strength, by C.S.Lewis, 1942