Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816.
“if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.”
In Jefferson’s day, the news media consisted of newspapers and pamphlets. The dissemination of information was limited by cost, literacy rates, and geography. It was not until the 1920s and 30s that radio offered to make information more widely accessible. That offer wasn’t due only to technology; it was mandated by government regulation: The Communications Act of 1934 included a requirement that broadcasters operate in the "public interest, convenience and necessity." The Supreme Court repeatedly has upheld this requirement along with the notion that the standard for broadcasters must be higher than that for newspapers and magazines. (See this Benton Foundation report for the background on and an interesting philosophical discussion of the public-interest requirement.)
Television promised to further increase the flow of information. But in the 1980s, new FCC commissioners deregulated the airwaves. Freed from serving the general good, television news discovered that commercial-entertainment formats were both less expensive to produce and more profitable. The changeover happened quickly. By 1990, an article appeared in Media&Values Magazine: “Whatever Happened to the News,” by Daniel Hallin. It gives the full story of this unfortunate transformation and is available on line from the Center for Media Literacy. An article from 1999 is equally good: “The Transformation of Network News. How Profitability Has Moved Networks Out of Hard News” by Marc Gunther in Nieman Reports.
One reason it happened so quickly is that, as Hallin notes, local affiliates paved the way. By the end of the 1970s, local news programming was becoming “heavily entertainment-oriented,” including a move to chatty, “happy talk” formats. They were chasing profits, of course, as were network morning shows, which also were becoming “strongly entertainment-oriented.”
Decades later, local news and national morning shows feature banal prattle, human interest stories of no conceivable consequence, and emotional but uninformative “man-in-the-street” interviews. (I firmly believe that the training given to local television reporters no longer concerns how to track down the facts of a story but how to coax innocent bystanders into giving shallow responses to an event they likely had not heard of before some reporter asked them how it made them feel.) Unfortunately, these degeneracies seem to have entertainment value and, therefore, show no sign of remediation. H. L. Mencken’s comment on tabloid newspapers has become appropriate also to local television news and network morning shows:
“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
In the 1980s, CNN debuted. It showed promise at a time when the networks were exploring their freedom from serving the public. For example, it covered, live, much of the Iran-Contra hearings. However, by 1990, Hallin could say that “day in and day out, CNN news offerings resemble local news more than anything else, mixing short reports on political affairs with large doses of weather and human interest.”
The 1980s also saw the demise of the documentary. Personal experience (and age) allows me to second Hallin in praising “CBS Reports.” The 1959 to 1971 series still is the unrivaled best of what television news is – or was – capable.
Today, it’s about ratings and profits, and they flow from entertainment, not news. Thus, current network and cable news: where elections are covered as horse races rather than as contested theories of governance or of economics, where the most prevalent election content is speculation, where networks devote all of thirty minutes a day to explaining world events, and where, out of what is left of those precious 30 minutes after commercials, lead-ins, teases, and credits, network news shows feel the need to end with some feel-good or happy-thoughts story.
Television news no longer has any requirement to educate the electorate, and they clearly have no such inclination. Unfortunately, people still use television news to get their information. They do use digital devices and other media, but most still use television as well. (For details, see a 2014 Pew study and a 2014 American Press Institute report.)
In my lifetime, we have gone from Walter Cronkite’s 1968 commentary on the Vietnam War to Chuck Todd telling us that the news media bears no responsibility to point out when a politician is lying or at least wrong. That is heartbreaking.
It also is damning. With that mindset, the news media become nothing more than an outlet by which politicians can broadcast their message: a free and unquestioning outlet with tremendous amplification. Yes, we have PolitiFact, but it rarely gets mainstream attention (and is newspaper based). If network and cable news agencies (excluding Fox, of course) do not see fact checking and the calling out of lies and misinformation as their job, they are useless as news entities in an election: entirely, utterly, completely, tragically useless.
So, beware what passes for our national press. Ignore them. Write them off. Forget them. But remember Jefferson.