On Monday in the fall of 1972, oddly enough on September 11th, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite decided to end his nightly broadcast with bad news.
“Professor Hubert Lamb says a new Ice Age is creeping over the northern hemisphere,” Cronkite began.
This could have been a joke, or deadly serious. Nothing in his delivery gave the slightest hint. Cronkite’s face was an advanced messaging machine , a broadcasting Ferrari.
He went on: “It won’t be as bad as the last Ice Age 60,000 years ago. Then, New York, Cincinnati and St. Louis were under five thousand feet of ice. Presumably, no traffic moved, and school was let out for the day.”
He paused. Again, not a single revealing twitch in that face.
“And that’s the way it is, Monday, September 11th, 1972.”
I was just old enough to groan over the hoopla when Walter Cronkite said And that’s the way it is for the last time on March 6th, 1981. I understood this was a national ritual, and Walter had been with us for so many crucial moments in history, from the death of John F. Kennedy to the moon landing.
But who cared about And that’s the way it is? Was that supposed to be deep? Even as an eleven-year-old, the fawning over the iconic signoff seemed phony to me, an example of the constant self-congratulation in which TV personalities – anchors, particularly – so often indulged.
In hindsight, I now realize that in the context of the medium, it was powerful stuff.
Cronkite’s famous signoff was designed to convey a message to viewers that they could now safely go back to their lives. It was a promise: the world would hold together, at least until the next day at the same time.
The Ice Age broadcast was a perfect illustration. Cronkite was holding copy designed to make you wet yourself, but he smiled and delivered it with a chuckle, conveying the opposite message.
“And that’s the way it is” was an expression of confidence, a contract between broadcaster and audience: “I trust you to come back tomorrow. Enjoy the next 23 hours without worry.”
This was a message not about the content of the newscast, but about the viewer’s relationship to television and the news itself. It was rhetorical punctuation, a period at sentence’s end.
Cronkite was announcing you’d come to the end of your news media experience that day. You could go back to your private life, a thing whose existence was recognized and, at least to a degree, respected.
Of course, Cronkite’s routine was clever marketing. People grew accustomed to the tradition of sitting around the television hearing Walter tell it like it is. The signoff was part of the Pavlovian reward. It drew viewers back.
But it had another meaning. In that era, there were people who read newspapers from beginning to end. As one former newspaper chain owner put it to me, this was a time when people could say, “I read the news,” and mean “all of it.”
The concept of news having an ending still existed.
There was a lot that was wrong and deceptive about the era of news Cronkite dominated. News watchers were presented with a highly limited and simplistic vision of the world, one that downplayed or omitted countless injustices, both at home and abroad. Many of those deceptions were chronicled in Manufacturing Consent.
But since the seventies and eighties, we’ve moved into a new realm of media messaging. The subtext is dramatically different from Cronkite’s day. Most news consumers haven’t noticed the change, or are too young to know. But it’s an awesome difference, and a terrifying one, if you know what to look for.
You can tell a lot about a country by how boring its media is.
If you turn on the TV and immediately feel like going to sleep, it generally means the political class feels secure.
In the Soviet Union of the seventies, a person with the misfortune to turn on the television might be treated to pulse-pounding content like Rural Hour – or a tourism show like Explorer’s Club, which showed Soviet citizens the amazing destinations they could legally visit, like Kiev, or Kiev.
It’s no accident that with the arrival of perestroika in the eighties came a new form of TV, which for the first time acted like it had to compete for your time. Soviet programmers brought in bawdy soap operas to dub from Latin America, and just before the collapse of the USSR, introduced a brightly lit Wheel of Fortune spinoff that’s on air to this day.
The audience, no longer fully captive, had to be grabbed.
America has sprinted far past that point. We are light years beyond trying to grab audiences, and are deep into a phenomenon that is closer to induced addiction or cult worship than marketing.
Turn on the TV in today’s America and it’s a shock to the senses. You can feel the producers in the background panicking at the thought of your thumb on the remote.
Content is designed not just to be lurid and sensational, but immediately disquieting from a psychological standpoint. You’re meant to see something in the first flash that upsets you to the point of needing to hang in at least until mental balance is restored.
This is the genius of the “crawl” or “chyron” in modern cable news, that banner sweeping across the screen that tells you what the anchor-head plans on saying, without having to listen to his or her throat-clearing intros.
Great examples are ALT-RIGHT FOUNDER QUESTIONS IF JEWS ARE PEOPLE or PELOSI CRITICIZED FOR “FIVE WHITE GUYS” JOKE.
In the former case you’ll stick with Jake Tapper for a few more minutes to make sure he tells off that alt-right upstart (whose message he’s deliberately put on national television for millions to hear).
In the latter case, if you’re watching Fox, you probably are a white guy, so you have to keep the program on to find out why the House minority leader is joking about you.
There’s nothing new about yellow headlines. They’ve been with us since at least the turn of the twentieth century, when Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World battled William Randolph Hearst’s New York Morning Journal for circulation.
Famed headers like WOMAN JUMPS FROM BROOKLYN BRIDGE, SURVIVES MAD LEAP operated on the same premise that causes highway rubbernecking, i.e. the inability to turn one’s head from something gross or horrible.
There was desperation behind those headlines, but it was just commercial, one newspaper not wanting to lose to another. We have that same dynamic still on cable and in the blogosphere, vastly accelerated if anything. The competition for eyeballs is more furious than ever.
But there’s a deeper added dimension. We don’t just want your eyes on us at all times. We want your attention away from something else.
Tone is the first thing you should think about when you turn on a TV news show or click on a news story. The emotional desperation in the tone of modern news content is striking. There is no Walter Cronkite smiling and telling you it’s safe to turn the news off now.
On the contrary, the between-the-lines message of most news isn’t just WORRY WORRY WORRY but STAY STAY STAY! Anchors often cast scolding, imploring glares at the screen, all but telling viewers they’ll be inviting instant death if they log off.
Cable stations don’t have “ends” to the news. They pass off one show to another, and these segues have become formalized, even popular. The standard is probably Rachel Maddow’s “Handoff” to Lawrence O’Donnell, where the two MSNBC anchors gently banter to blur a five minute line between shows.
On the surface it’s jovial and jokey, but it’s a million miles from the “Goodnight, and until tomorrow, fuck the Ice Age” message of Cronkite.
A Maddow-O’Donnell handoff is always drearily about anti-Republican solidarity, just as a Tucker Carlson-Sean Hannity baton-pass, while less formalized, never leaves the anti-Democrat theme for a second. We are always at war with each other. It never stops, not for one second.
This is a profound expression of political instability at the top of our society.
There is a terror of letting audiences think for themselves we’ve never seen before. There’s no, “Go back home tonight, rest, and think it over.”
Even from show to show the viewer is asked to remain glued to the conflict at all times. In print media your eyes scroll down to similar-themed stories, stringing you from one outrage to another. Keep clicking, keep delving deeper into the argument, make it more and more your identity.
We don’t want you signing off until tomorrow because we don’t want you to even understand that you have a self that is separate from the news experience. Click on, watch, read, tweet, argue, come back, click again, repeat, do it over and over, rubbing the nerve ends away just a little bit each time, signing over more and more of your intellectual autonomy.
You’ll become dependent on the cycle, to the point where you’ll lose the ability to dispute what you’re being told, because disputing would mean diluting the bond with your favored news sources.
This without a doubt is a form of religious worship. It’s what was being parodied in the movie Network, in which an anchorman who loses his mind and begins telling the truth is swallowed up and turned into the biggest hit show in the country.
That film was parable about how TV can commoditize and ritualize anything, from profane truth to madness. Mass media can make the act of watching more important than the words. It can take rage and defiance, and in a snap turn it into obedience and submission. Listening in anger to your favorite political program, you will act like a person who is shaking a fist at power, when in fact you’re just a human laugh track, almost an automated show element.
As with all religions, the arc of devotion can be bent with time. When belief flags the tenets of the religion become more and more extreme, the manipulations more aggressive, the promises more graphic. The preacher starts promising dates for the end of the world, telling the members to start preparing the Kool-Aid, get ready to shed their containers, etc.
A religion becomes a cult when it doesn’t allow exposure to the outside. Cronkite’s “See you tomorrow!” model has to disappear. Mentally, we don’t want you ever leaving the compound. No interacting with suppressive persons!
Social media has wildly enhanced the illusion that there’s no life outside news. Once upon a time, you didn’t know who reporters were once they put the microphone down. You rarely knew what they stood for, whether they were jokesters or bullies, conservative demagogues or mellow hippies.
Now reporters never go home. They are on social media day and night. They share everything, from pictures of their cats to takes on the North Korean nuclear crisis.
Unfortunately, because pushing any of the various taboos – I don’t care or I don’t know or I hate both parties – can have career-altering consequences, they don’t show truly different sides to themselves. Most of these social media accounts simply become personalized extensions of their politicized public personalities.
So Jake Tapper can spend half his day retweeting about how kids should play with dogs more, and the other half sending messages about how Trump should end the shutdown. You never go home, there is no non-political space: you’re always on the compound.
News consumers on both sides today behave quite like cultists. They self-isolate. They’re kept that way by being fed a steady diet of terrifying stories about fellow citizens.
Red-staters are told liberals are terror-sympathizers desperate to eviscerate American culture from within out of white guilt.
Blue-staters are peppered daily with stories of fellow travelers and traitors in their midst, the latest and most incredible example being NBC’s effort to paint presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as a tool of the Kremlin.
Most intelligent people in the Gabbard case could see Beltway hacks were piling on a politician for taking a heretical stance against a foreign military deployment.
Still, the underlying message was important: Russian influence is everywhere, and anyone, even a member of congress, might be a witting or unwitting agent. Be vigilant! Suspect everyone, except us! We’re the only people you know are unaffected.
This deeply paranoid view of the human experience, telling all America it lives on a violent invisible influence battlefield, is the opposite of what the news used to be. The news was once a placid ritual designed to amp down the viewer’s political reflex.
The church of the press was a sleepy place. In the seventies and eighties, in fact, news was infamous for its non-confrontational nature and vapidity. This was the joke of Anchorman, that the biggest story in human history was a panda birth.
News companies then were trying to train audiences to be docile and unconcerned.
A local news affiliate would pack its lineup with cat-in-tree segments, and the weather slots got longer and longer throughout the decades. A local reporter once joked to me that the highest paid news-gatherer in every city would soon be a helicopter. Aerial shots of the local skyline were more important than fifty, a hundred exposés.
Within a decade or so after Watergate, audiences had been trained not to want to watch disturbing news. They were soon more interested in the weather. After all, it was relevant to their lives (people still had lives).
Today it’s the opposite. We’re trying to keep your brain locked in emotional overdrive. This is not just for the grubby commercial reason that it keeps people tuned in, but because it prevents them from thinking about other things.
What other things?
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent identified “five filters,” through which they said mass media operated. These were Ownership, Advertising, Sourcing, Flak, and an Organizing Religion.
Their basic idea was news media as synthesis of elite concerns. News has to serve the ends of media owners by making a profit, or enhancing the prestige of a larger profit-making network.
It has to coincide with values of advertisers, strengthen the relationships between top news agencies and high-level government sources, and serve the propaganda aims of those sources, often by organizing the population against a common enemy.
This model has been disrupted somewhat – the idea of anticommunism as an organizing religion has gone bust, for instance – but the same underlying truth applies.
The news at its core is still a vehicle for advancing elite interests. For this reason it has to be understood in its totality. You can’t grasp it looking station to station, demographic to demographic. You won’t see it just watching MSNBC or Fox. The issue is the cumulative effect of both.
The split landscape prevents audiences from noticing shared problems. Once, cats in trees, Dynasty, and cool vids on MTV were enough to distract people from institutional corruption.
Today people are struggling in new ways and have lost so much trust in institutions that the only way to keep eyeballs away from problems is by throwing the hardest stuff at them. Every TV pitch is a max-effort fastball. We can’t allow attention to flag for even a moment because the evidence of political incompetence and corruption is so apparent and undeniable.
For most citizens, be they urban or rural, white or nonwhite, poor or solvent, health care services are a catastrophe. There are entire congressional districts without a functioning maternity ward. Stories of couples having to drive 100 miles at high speed to have babies are no longer uncommon anywhere in America.
We suffer from profound and worsening inequality in income and criminal justice outcomes, a complete lack of job security for most, crumbling infrastructure (aggravated by extraordinary inefficiency and waste in government), an epidemic of anti-competitive practice and rent-seeking among the biggest companies, and devastating environmental threats on multiple fronts, from overfished oceans to a toxic “garbage patch” twice the size of Texas floating in the Pacific.
“Day Zero,” when a million people in Cape Town, South Africa, will lose running water, is one of the first major dominoes expected to fall on that front – in the summer of 2019.
These and a hundred other problems are common to the entire global population, not just Republicans or Democrats in the United States.
Fixing these problems would be hard. It’s much easier to stall everyone, by keeping people obsessed with intramural/provincial arguments.
In America, the most influential country, the “elite” as Chomsky and Herman would have defined it, now flexes its propaganda muscles by dividing the population and setting it in permanent combat with itself.
This has been an extraordinarily profitable strategy, politically and financially. In 2018, all the big media companies, despite marked declines in journalistic performance, made buck. The New York Times made a second quarter profit of $24 million, which as any newspaper person will tell you is damn good for… a newspaper.
CBS made a third-quarter profit of $1.24 billion, even after president Les Moonves – the guy who made trouble by admitting Trump was bad for America but good for the “bottom line” – was forced to resign in a #MeToo scandal. At the end of the year 2018, MSNBC sat in the ratings pole position, ahead of Fox, for the first time in 18 years, even as Fox cable itself had record revenues of $1.51 billion.
So this strategy makes money. But it also serves political purposes.
In order for everyone up top with a say in the matter to come out ahead – from advertisers to Internet distributors to politicians to political donors whose industries have an interest in molding public attitudes – this had to be the outcome. Anything but the most intense kind of reality-show civil war would leave Americans free to stare their real problems in the face.
This is ruse, inverse Chomsky. If we once manufactured the consent of the population for everything from the Vietnam War to the bombing of Kosovo to the occupation of Iraq, we’re now manufacturing discontent. It’s the only way to prevent uprising.
It can’t hold. As we saw with the election of Trump and with the Bernie Sanders campaign (and with countless protest movements around the world, from Catalonia to the Gilets Jaunes), voters may be dumb, but not stupid. They know enough to be angry. Commercial news media has tried to wave enough red capes to keep them charging at the screen, but this can only work for so long.
There’s no way to hide the fact that turning off the news results in an instantly positive psychological change for most people. If you want to be happier, if you want to live in a world that may be thick with problems but is at least a sunnier place where people are more kind to one another and more willing to cooperate, just turn off the tube.
If you must be a news consumer, be aware of all the pressures laid out in this book. Remember the place you occupy in the consumer operation.
From the moment your eyes move to the screen, one company is selling you a consumer product, while another company is selling you to another set of buyers. Your attention is one product, the data about your surfing behavior another, and so on.
The news, the actual information in the middle, is almost incidental. What matters is the time you spend engaged. This is why you should always be suspicious of anyone who tells you to worry about things you can’t control.
Think about how Walter Cronkite told you to blow off an Ice Age, and smiled as he signed off until tomorrow.
Then think about how Rachel Maddow, just after the New Year, hypothesized in the middle of a nationwide cold front that the Russians could turn off your heat at any moment.
No parent who goes to bed at night looking at their children nestled under covers can afford not to think about the possibility of the heat being switched off (and not just in your house, but a whole region). What would you do, if there were no warm places to bring your children? Your elderly parents?
These are desperate tactics that betray desperation, an empty hand. When George W. Bush wanted to invade Iraq, they had to go so far down the road of upsetting the American public that it’s comic to remember.
Even Colin Powell was forced to agree with Bush that Saddam Hussein had drones that “if transported” could be used to spray poison or “biological agents” on the American heartland. How exactly was Saddam going to do this transporting? On his aircraft carriers? We reported this stuff in seriousness.
But that was just temporary mania, drummed up for the narrow purpose of getting the population to a) support a pointless war, and b) help Republicans win a couple of elections, beginning with the 2002 midterms.
This current craze is far more intense, bipartisan, and open-ended. It’s not designed to be a temporarily blinding fervor. This is panic you’re told never to excise from your life, or else…
Or else what? We don’t articulate that, for good reason.
Of all the taboos and deceptions in media, the thing we’re most afraid to discuss has to do with the question of what happens, if you should stop following the news.
The answer, of course, is nothing. Not only can you live without us, you probably should.
And that’s the way it is.
Earlier in ‘Hate Inc.’:
This scenario was predicted in the writings of Marshall McCluhan, the medium being the message itself, and in Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle".
It's fascinating to consider whether the elite are purposefully creating the political conflict through manipulation of the media's messaging or whether the media has fallen into the pattern by naturally lusting for profit. Either way the gradual collapse of this broken system seems inevitable. Not being manipulated by the messaging seems the only reasonable goal. I really appreciate Matt's efforts.