When is the news not news?

Walter Cronkite- the best news anchor in history

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

― John F. Kennedy

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: 'And that's the way it is.' To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

Walter Cronkite

Knowledge is power, and information is the life's blood of any functioning society. The sheer volume of available information and how it's distributed has changed radically in my lifetime. The available information that used to be summarized in a set of 30 encyclopedias is now measured in zettabytes, (a trillion gigabytes!), more information than even the strongest supercomputer can make sense of. With so much information at our fingertips, are we better informed than we were fifty years ago? Or has it just made things worse as we turn to cognitive shortcut to cut it down to size?

The late 20th century was the heyday of journalism, and though there were fewer outlets for news, the quality of the stories they produced were excellent. Walter Cronkite, anchorman at CBS news, was the most trusted man in America after guiding us through the JFK assassination, the moon landing, and the Vietnam War. Cronkite didn't use exaggeration or hyperbole to deliver the news, and he earned the trust of partisans on both sides. Newspaper journalists like Woodward and Bernstein broke big stories about corruption, and papers had big budgets to put their people into the field to dig around and pursue the truth. I used to get two newspapers delivered to my house- a conservative one in the morning and a liberal one in the afternoon. Now I'm forced to read editions online and there's much less to read.

Newspapers today are mere shells of themselves, though some good reporting still exists. I love reading newspapers because they at least try to give an accurate, detailed picture of the events of the area, nation, and world. Even better, newspapers don't read you back and collect data from you every time you peruse an ad or article. Now our news consumption is monitored and guided by algorithms that try to get us hooked on whatever stories it thinks we'll follow, with entertainment value winning over accuracy or relevance.

Television news has been dragged down by an increased emphasis on making profits. This has resulted in biased networks that cherry-pick the news to feed and inflame their target audience, or bland network news full of explosions, natural disasters, and happy talk. Because when you get down to it, no one wants to hear challenging information, they want to hear things that confirm what they already believe. Politics, which used to be a serious business, is now a show where people want to know who's winning and who's losing. Network news programs, which were the gold standard in tv news, have lost over half of their viewers (and advertising revenue) to streaming and alternate news options.

I used to like watching the morning news to start my day. But then I noticed that in a 2 or 3 hour show there was only about 10 minutes of actual news and the rest was commercials and filler. Celebrities are not news, nor are diversionary legal dramas or cute kitten videos. We can get that anywhere.

An informed population is critical to a functioning democracy. The shattering of the journalism and explosion of information has invited a whole host of partisans, podcasters, bloggers like me, and even late night comedy shows to fill in the void. There's just too much information for anyone to process, and more than ever we need reliable sources. Unfortunately, we aren't such great judges of who those reliable sources are, given that we don't like disturbing news and we love hearing things that entertain us or confirm our beliefs. We don't shoot the messenger, we just change the channel.

Where we get our news today depends on age. Boomers like me still rely on televised news and newspapers. Most younger people belong to the smart phone era, and they mostly get their news from online sources. Newspapers and televisions aren't very good at spying on your news choices, but smart phones try to watch and influence everything that you see. Hopefully the next generations will get wise enough to outsmart the smart phones and look for nuanced, accurate versions of the truth while avoiding the unfounded conspiracies and rabbit holes.

For me, I still love my local newspaper, as well as the New York Times on occasion for more national and global perspective. Online journalists like Judd Legum are great at digging up new stories, and shows like 60 Minutes, Frontline, and John Oliver are my favorites for doing deep dives into complicated issues. Plus there are hundreds of great non-fiction books released every year that are the deepest dives with the strongest level of reporting and references. I try to review some of them here, and they are invaluable to my map of the world and how it operates.

My best piece of advice in this age of too much information is to vary your sources and be aware of the biases of all your sources. Every source has a blind spot, even your parents, and you won't get a clear picture if you rely on blind acceptance. Question everything until it works for you, and don't be afraid to question again in the future when things change.

Below is a sample media bias chart from the Ad Fontes Media folks. There are others out there, but this one seems pretty fair. It rates sources based on left/right bias and reliability of factual reporting. Don't believe everything that you read on the internet- especially the most sensational claims that are more likely click bait.

As my old friend Abe Lincoln once said: