“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

This is the immortal refrain yelled by anchor-man Howard Beale in the 1976 film ‘Network’. Forty years on from its UK release, the film has easily as much to say about the state of the world’s television news as Apple’s ‘The Morning Show’ in 2021.

When I was a child in the 1960s watching ‘the News’ (North, East, West, South), the reporters spoke in crisp, received pronunciation and imparted almost nothing that was not fact. There were no ‘vox pop’ or third-party talking heads. The images were there to inform. The presenters themselves stoic - until Angela Rippon danced on Morecambe and Wise!

So when and why did it all change?

Was it the politics? In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission in America scrapped the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ which freed US broadcasters to editorialise. They no longer had to show - ‘on the other hand’ - opposing views. Then along came cable upstarts like CNN and Fox which led to the partisan histrionics of today’s TV. And of course, thousands of PRs and lobby groups were on hand to help out with providing the content.

Or was it the rolling news cycle? With so much time to fill, there became a widening of what counted as news ‘reporting’. What used to be a bone dry recitation of the facts became padded out to interpretation, contention and the quest for stories. ‘Meaning’ was always couched within a context. Were the phrase not already taken, ‘news’ would be called ‘Impressionism’ (Ganesh 2021).

Perhaps it was the exponential explosion of social media where thousands of Twitter bots now write the news and journalists themselves admit to mostly living in the ‘bubble’ of a pernicious Twitter microclimate? Rolling news has certainly had to contend with the social media phenomenon. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, 18% of US adults cite social media as their main source of political news (figures also supported by Ofcom). It’s become hard to sell to the public on the sanctity of a fact when ‘traditional’ television news counts for such a vanishing share of broadcast time. And at what point can television news even be called ‘traditional’ as the slide towards social media news continues unabated?

Maybe it’s the combination of politics and social media? Trump is the living embodiment of Neil Postman’s belief that we are ‘amusing ourselves to death’. Under Trump, news has become (or has been reduced to) entertainment. Trump, a former reality TV star, helped to create a news cycle in which opinions and facts seemed interchangeable. ‘Alternate facts’ and accusations of ‘fake news’ have corroded public discourse globally, until Michael Gove (2016) opined we had ‘had enough of experts’.

Every President of the United States has used media to connect directly with their base, right from Roosevelt and his evening radio fireside chats in the 1930s and 40s. As the number of television sets grew (172,000 sets in 1949 - 52 million sets by 1953), Nixon and Kennedy became all too aware of the need to ‘present’ their news. Fast forward to Trump’s era and Twitter became his medium of choice and he was a genius (or idiot savant?) at it. 

Trump cunningly uses Twitter the way ordinary people use social media - poorly. His typos, regular indulgence in slander, unthinking repetition of inaccurate news from obviously unreliable websites; these are precisely the problems public figures have historically sought to avoid when broadcasting official communications. ‘By embracing them, Trump made his Twitter feed relatable in a way more calculated communicators never could’. (Dan Brooks) 2021)

Now Trump is banned from Twitter - a contentious move which both Navalny and Merkle disagree with (and which Uganda’s new president, Museveni, probably agrees with). It remains to be seen how Trump will voice his beliefs in the future. Probably via his own News channel which will lead to increased (‘echo chamber’) polarisation and further lack of reasoned political debate (John Gray 2021). And there will be more media handwringing about that too when the ‘real’ news really ought to be talked about. 

(Cue record scratch and rolling of eyes…) ‘OK, here we go, so what’s the ‘real’ news Quint?’ I hear you shout gleefully.

Well, ironically perhaps, the real news bleeds, but doesn’t lead. At least as often as it should. It’s hidden in plain sight with a factual, metric-heavy basis and very little entertainment value (unless you count guilt as entertainment). If we don’t stop this planet-warming NOW our civilisation is, candidly, broken.

In conclusion…

The News IS important. News coverage is far more than a benign source of facts. From our attitudes towards immigrants to the content of our dreams, it 'click baits' into our subconscious and meddles with our lives in surprising ways. It leads us to miscalculate certain risks, shapes our views of foreign countries, and possibly influences the health of entire economies. What's left in and out of 'the news' is vitally important.

Well, that’s all we have time for and I’m still ‘mad as Hell’!