When journalism is a circus.
Existential jokes aren't as phunny as they used to be.
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I
It’s hard to improve on Kierkegaard. He usually shows up as a kind of intellectually snobby reference in Woody Allen movies, but his humor was razor sharp and came wrapped in a crinkly, bitter candy coating of irony and something like a micro-dose of MDMA. Reading him has the same effect watching Rocky and Bullwinkle had on people in my generation: your 5 year old self laughed at the deliberately dumb jokes but you always suspected there was something more going on — and honestly, what was up with the Narrator, anyway? IYKYK.
Anyway, something to think about. Hm…
Right… back to the Evening News.
You’ve probably noticed that the mainstream media have retreated from what used to be called “the news” — i.e. Walter Conkite era reporting — to something more like the viral-hopefulness of thirsty TikToks.
This has been going on a long time.
One night, maybe 20 years ago now, the local news here in Milwaukee began its evening coverage with: 1) a sweet but cliched story about a little kid whose class shaved their heads to support her battle with leukemia (yay!), 2) some footage of a car chase in Los Angeles (oooh, ahhh), and — and I’m not making this up — 3) a cat being rescued from a tree (awwww). Those were their lede stories. They managed to avoid any mention of an important city council vote on the future of our tax dollars. The Cat Story was apparently more important. I needed to know why. My inner AngryOldManShoutsAtClouds reacted. I called the station and asked for the News Director. They answered! In my calmest voice (honest!) I said something like, “I have to ask you: you covered a car chase from 2000 miles away and a cat rescue, but you left out the budget vote and anything else that directly affects anyone who lives here?”
They indignantly sneered back, “We stand by our story” — and hung up.
‘Course they did.
Okay, local news. Sure. Fine. But what about…..
It just gets worse.
The other night on the national evening news — not incidentally, perhaps, on the network owned by Disney — they led off with “Breaking at this Hour!” 1) some whiz-bang cell phone footage of an airplane cabin during severe turbulence over Iowa (yay!), followed by 2) several minutes recapping bad weather across the US, including storm tracks from a possible hurricane, still a week away, and home video of some trees getting blown by the wind (oooh, ahhh). These first stories were then interrupted by maybe 60 seconds of “real news” on the situation in Gaza and 60 more on the Mad King Orange’s plan to add a Gilded Age Ballroom to the White House. But of course they 3) concluded the program with three stories about celebrities — one of whom had recently died (awwww).
Now, you might’ve noticed the continuing coup underway in the US, led by a President unencumbered by either the Constitution or a moral compass who has deliberately eroded the trust of our trading partners, alienated our strategic allies and, most damaging of all, dissolved any trust in the idea that the truth matters.
In another, earlier, universe that sort of stuff might’ve been mentioned in an “informational news program.”
Not anymore. Not on the evening news. Kelly Clarkson’s husband dying of melanoma was more important than the President continuing to ignore the law. Sure. Why not?
TV is now a Disney theme park using animatronics and sparkly distractions to drive content. Cool videos of violent car crashes, ecological disasters (without reference to global warming) enhance viewership more aggressively than reporting on the corruption now spreading through the American experiment like herpes — or covid.
The evening news is as much a reality show as the Housewives of Beverly Hills, or Atlanta, or wherever — and we’ve been conditioned to prefer our role as an audience to the spectacle of America, over our official, constitutional role, as participants in the action.
And so, when the clowns on the evening news come out and say “breaking news at this hour, the world is on fire” we grab another beer, sit back in our BarcaLoungers remote in hand, amused and diverted from the inconvenience of personal engagement with the price of eggs or our civic responsibilities.
What a great show!
Karl Marx was not generally a funny guy, but he made some pretty good observations about how the world works. Like, famously, this one:
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon
We should be so lucky.
But here we are.
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It's all very true. The worst is the financial news. There is no such thing as bad news. No reason to ever sell or worry about the market. Years ago, I wrote for the The Motley Fool (Well named!) $50 if they liked your story. I foolishly wrote about the problems Boeing was having with their 737. They weren't interested in bad news. So, no deal. Then they started falling out of the sky. The news was out there they just chose not to report it.