As usual, the nineteenth century saw this coming. Tocqueville and Nietzsche, among many others, long ago predicted that an advanced democratic culture would entail a flattening of the spiritual landscape, discouraging the development of truly outstanding individuals who are willing and able to think and feel for themselves. Personal judgments, they saw, would increasingly be handed over to the masses. Neither thinker, of course, could have predicted precisely the forms that this flattening would take in the age of Facebook.
Jon Stewart is, let us say, neither the Nietzsche nor the Toqueville of the twenty-first century. He does, however, possess over those thinkers the advantage of contemporaneity. On February 28 he devoted a segment of The Daily Show to one more contemporary instance of democratic flattening, the recent dumbing down of CNN—or, one could say, its democratizing down. The wide mania for audience participation has apparently inspired the directors of CNN not just to pander to Joe and Jane Six Pack, but to give them a share of direct editorial control. Stewart played a painful montage of frivolous new CNN features, including two regular segments that amount to playing, and sort of commenting on, amusing YouTube videos.
The most damaging part of Stewart’s indictment, however, involved a feature CNN is calling “Choose the News” in which the network plays very brief teasers for three different news stories, and invites viewers to vote, via text message, on which stories CNN should cover later in the hour. The three stories on the voting block concerned, respectively, outrage over plans for a government takeover of womens’ shelters in Afghanistan (including photos of badly bruised female limbs and torsos), the significance of the Abu Dhabi arms bazaar (which is “the largest weapons show in the Middle East and Africa”) and a segment on homeless female veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Stewart pointed out, all three of these seem “kind of important.”
It doesn’t require an overweening respect for the news editors at CNN to think that a trained, experienced journalist, who has seen the stories in question, might be better qualified than me to decide which of these stories deserves airtime (as if airtime is so scarce in our 24 hour news cycle). This is simply a new level of pandering. CNN is, of course, no stranger to giving the people what they want. “Choose the News” is a tacit, and astute, recognition that what the people want now is to believe that they are the experts. So that is precisely what CNN—“The Most Trusted Name in News”—is willing to telling them. In the process the journalists at CNN abdicate their responsibility to furrow their brows and make hard, smart editorial judgments. Neither Nietzsche nor Tocqueville would be surprised. This is the trajectory that they mapped out, in imprecise terms, more than a century ago.
I’ll try to take a deep breath. Charmed (and convinced) as I am by jeremiads about the spiritual vapidity of contemporary America, it’s important to acknowledge now and then that contemporary America, with all the “Choose the News” silliness that we continually foist on ourselves, is not exactly a Huxleyan dystopia. At least not yet. And pace extreme anti-capitalists like Ward Churchill, the custodians of corporate America are not “little Eichmanns.” That’s going too far. But the imperatives to “keep the shareholders happy”, and to “give the people what they want” (so often indistinguishable) are indeed the free society’s version of “just following orders”, releasing powerful individuals from the heavy burdens of judgment. Those few individuals who do take it upon themselves to help the curious citizen think well about his world – intellectuals, writers, journalists, say—will have to spend an ever-increasing amount of energy resisting the centripetal force of an ever more democratized culture.
March 4th, 2011 | 11:01 am
There’s nothing “taut” or “astute” about CNN and hasn’t been for more than a decade.
Why are they trying to make their broadcast channel some strange parody of their website? On the web I can pick what link to click (not have some sort of vote determine it for me) and have way more than 3 choices. So what’s the appeal of watching their TV feed? (I note that I stopped getting cable years ago, so I’m not really of interest to them anyway.)
If CNN wants to see what works in cable news, can’t they just flip the channel to their competitor who is pulverizing them in every possible way? Why do they refuse to do this? In what other industry do failing brands absolutely refuse to emulate the dominant company? It’s all so very odd…
March 4th, 2011 | 11:15 am
Come on.
I write for a technology news Website. The IP-based Internet has over-turned the stable, well-known models of publishing and journalism, and of broadcasting. Everyone in those three areas is trying to figure out what comes next. (The best evidence for this is the rise of an entirely new industry of futurists, pundits, authors, bloggers, and consultants who earn a living telling people like me that things are changing and to do X, Y, and Z.)
So do these CNN experiments look silly? Sure. And it’s easy to make them look and sound silly. That’s what satire and satirists like Stewart do. And the pretensions, delusions, not to mention simple bafflement of today’s news media give him an endless supply of material.
But at one level, the CNN experiment is nothing more than experimenting with a technology that introduces something really new into News: interactivity. CNN simply said to its viewers: of these three things, what are YOU most interested in?
That’s not “democratization,” or “dumbing down,” or the dawn of the Nietzschean apocalypse.
If anything, it seems to me like the possible start of another new thing in news: humility.
March 4th, 2011 | 11:29 am
If Fox News is beating CNN in “every possible way,” that does not make it a superior product. It just makes it a better selling product. A superior product would be measured by a different criteria than ratings or number of hits. This is the point that Mr. Corbin is making: that we need consider more than the desires of the crowd when we steward our airwaves.
March 4th, 2011 | 11:55 am
And being a better selling product does not NOT make it a superior product as well. You’re right that ratings alone do not effectively measure this sense of overall quality, but improving overall quality is obviously not the point of “you choose the news” and other interactive stunts. As these obvious (and clumsy) attempts are aimed at higher ratings and not higher quality, it seems to me that Brian’s comment is still quite apt: why not emulate the dominant market leader?
March 4th, 2011 | 12:02 pm
CNN has absolutely nothing to do with “our airwaves.”
And I don’t much care about their quality or that of Fox News, since I already said that I don’t have cable. Nor do most people much care, since the average viewership of Fox is a couple million people, or less than 1% of the population.
The fact is that “the centripetal force of an ever more democratized culture” is brilliant for the media consumer, since I can now find any commentator or journalist who wants to put their stuff out there, and find quality that may not be backed up by conventional credentials. So I can read Michael Totten, say, who blows away 99.99% of MSM commentators on Middle East issues. And I can read The Anchoress, for example, ditto on religious issues. And I can read Iowahawk eviscerating Paul Krugman. Etc. Etc. Etc. So there’s a lot of junk out there–so what? There’s tons of worthless garbage claiming to be “news” printed in newspapers and broadcast on TV. There’s also tons of good stuff, and with contemporary search engines based on links the good stuff isn’t that hard to find.
March 4th, 2011 | 1:12 pm
Is CNN the channel that recently changed most of its anchors and journalists to Brits? Presumably the higher class english accent gives them the air of authority?
March 4th, 2011 | 1:36 pm
Changing to Brits may have given the anchors a presumed air of authority to everyone but Americans and Germans, but it also meant that the anchors have worse teeth and no taste buds.
But hell, it impresses the Belgians.
March 4th, 2011 | 2:41 pm
Brian, I concede that new forms of media can help higher quality content to find its path to people who want it. But the ideal of a television station is not the same as that of a private website. A TV station is aiming to do something for a wide audience from a quasi-universal perspective. So we need different ways to look at it. CNN is trying to incorporate new media attitudes for an old media form. It should instead reform the old media form.
March 4th, 2011 | 4:20 pm
The problem is, people have begun evaluating “news” according to whether it entertains, rather than whether is information that is important to know, or important for an informed citizenry.
The value judgment here is “what is important for an informed citizenry to know?”
The answer is “nothing, really – there’s no value in an informed citizenry.”
March 6th, 2011 | 8:32 am
“The problem is, people have begun evaluating “news” according to whether it entertains …”
Not quite. The evaluation, where is counts, is whether news will sell.
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