The News is About to Change
I’m sure most of us took a giant collective sigh of relief this week after the inauguration. Whether you supported Trump or Biden or the Lizard Party, you must be looking forward to a period of calmer politics.
Unless you’re a for-profit news organization, that is.
While incidents like ‘Four Seasons Total Landscaping’ and countless other practical embarrassments were amusing at best, and shocking at worst, the media couldn’t get enough of it.
Because we couldn’t get enough of it.
I have a new rule I abide by—if it’s great for the media, it’s terrible for satirists.
Just ask the creators of South Park about writing their scripts the last few years. As they said in an interview back in 2017, they couldn’t come up with anything funny anymore, “because satire has become reality.”
Hopefully— just hopefully—this statement will start reversing itself in the foreseeable future.
But while that’s good for aspiring satirists like me, it might not be so good for the large media corporations. With rampant conspiracy theories and misinformation flooding our screens, especially during this past decade, people are worried to say the least.
Who can we trust?
What information should we believe?
Who’s actually disseminating what we see?
These problems won’t go away anytime soon. And the governments know this.
Proof in point, the rising-star AOC recently made a startling statement to believers in absolute free speech:
“We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment, so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.”
That may not sound that shocking to many people, but they’re now forming a committee to look at reining in the US news ecosystem. It remains to be seen what their committee will strive to do.
Over a century ago, the term ‘yellow journalism’ was used to refer to news articles that were published solely to make money rather than to inform people.
Headlines used extreme exaggeration, scandal creation, and sensationalism to catch readers’ attention.
This era of false news even strongly spurred sentiment to go to war with Spain, and certainly contributed to the kick-off of the Spanish-American Civil War.
William Randolph Hearst, one of the largest media barons at the time, was often quoted as saying:
“You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war!”
Sounds like an old-timey Tucker Carlson to me. Maybe that’s why he also wears a bow-tie?
But how did the era of ‘yellow journalism’ come to an end? Not by any government’s hand, surprisingly.
The news environment during this period of the 1880s to 1900s was dominated by competition between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
It was their sheer rivalry that led to more and more battling over eyeballs. Often to the detriment of truth and society.
It came to a head in 1901 after two columnists, Ambrose Bierce (a famous satirist—eek) and Arthur Brisbane (an editor), separately published pieces interpreted as calling for the assassination of President William McKinley.
Fast forward to September of that year—McKinley was shot twice in the stomach and later died from his wounds. He was the 3rd president of the United States to be assassinated.
Hearst and Pulitzer were attacked left and right. Their battle for domination of the news was blamed for fanning the flames of this foul deed.
And it shook them both to the core.
Snapped back into reality, Pulitzer returned his major newspaper, New York World, back to its roots of quality reporting and ceased the sensationalist battle. Over time, his newspaper became one of the most respected in the world.
He died knowing his media had returned a semblance of calm to the country.
Does this history remind you of anything today?
CNN vs Fox News
The New York Times vs The Washington Post
One America News vs reality
Disinformation. Sensationalism. Fake news and manufactured scandals.
We’re living through a repeat of history right now.
Steve Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News and recently pardoned by Trump for fraud, was banned from Twitter in November after calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s beheading.
“I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.”
While Twitter banned him for this ridiculous statement, the leader of Facebook had a different reaction:
Mark Zuckerberg said the call for assassination:
“Clearly did not cross the line.”
Clearly.
Just look at how QAnon— in it’s ridiculous beliefs of a deep state Satanic pedophila ring—helped spur on the storming of the Capitol building.
Their messaging was propagated through 4chan, 8chan, then Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, and finally on Twitter itself through the disgraced ex-President.
Only in the fall of 2020 did we start to see any of these media platforms begin clamping down on the calls for violence and rebellion. This was after nearly 3 years of unfettered propaganda.
Why do I say propaganda? Because Russian backed organizations were tied to amplifying some of QAnon’s most extreme theories.
While Twitter has repeatedly performed cleanups, deleting hundreds of thousands of accounts linked to troll-factories, they are always one-step behind.
Facebook has also jumped on the bandwagon, albeit to a lesser degree.
The point is, the misinformation is merely being curtailed. The moderators cannot keep up with the millions of posts, tweets, and videos being created everyday.
They’re also being left with the responsibility of deciding what is and what isn’t appropriate. Shouldn’t these rules be made by the people we elect to govern us?
It’s a slippery slope, and I certainly don’t have the answers.
Back in 1901, it took the assassination of a sitting US president for the media to change. And even then, it wasn’t the government that forced it.
Will this time be different? I certainly hope so.
Perhaps the invasion of the Capitol was the turning point in our era. Perhaps not. Or perhaps Albert Camus’s advice may hold the real answer for all of us:
“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”
On that note, it’s time to turn off my phone and computer for the night.
Thanks for reading, as always.
J.J. Pryor
And I thought you were just another pretty face! A very thoughtful article and one that posses an unspoken problem - How to get the Media to stop printing and broadcasting things they know are false and how to get them to call out politicians who are obviously lying? The idea of giving opposing viewpoints equal time is good, except when one viewpoint is obviously false. Giving people who deny science equal time with scientists who are reporting substantiated facts is very confusing to the average person. Normally, I like what AOC has to say, but this time she is wrong. It's a great idea to "Bell the Cat", but who gets to decide what statements get "Belled"? The media needs to police itself, as it has done in the past, but as long as accountants rule, all they will care about is the bottom line. If I remember correctly, in the past there was something called the Fairness Doctrine, which roughly said if you reported a Democrat saying one thing you would need to give equal time to the opposing Republican view. I would like to see some informal agreement between the various media organizations about labeling some things as being so outlandish they can't be believed - Lizzard People and Pedophile rings as two examples. With power comes responsibility and the media need to be held accountable when they report things that have no basis in fact. There are various ways of proving the world is round (actually an oblate spheroid) but if someone says it is flat they need to be able to prove their point before they get air time. BTW I love your drawing.