Television News Is Poison, Don’t Watch It
It’s not just FOX News
As Tomahawk missiles cruised through the sky over Syria in the early morning of April 7, 2017, pseudo-respected American newsman Brian Williams quoted Leonard Cohen. “We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean,” he said. “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen.”
Williams gave into temptation and quoted the famed singer-songwriter. “‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons,’” he said. “They are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is for them what is a brief flight over to this airfield … what did they hit?”
Asking what they hit should have been the first question. That’s his job. But I’m not surprised. This is television news, after all, and television news is poison. All of it.
Williams wasn’t the only T.V. pundit basking in the glory of America’s awesome military might that evening. Talking head Fareed Zakaria told the world that Donald Trump “became president of the United States,” after firing 59 missiles on the Syrian airfield. He also said there was a “morally affirming element to this,” as footage of the missiles played in a box next to his head.
Canadian pundit Mark Steyn went on Fox and Friends the next morning to talk about how awesome the whole thing was. Steyn obsessively focused over the fact that Trump apparently ordered the strike while eating dinner with Chinese officials.
“As I understand it, he told him over the creme brulee or the tiramisu,” Steyn said. “How cool is that to actually make the Chinese politburo sit through a night of American targeted bombing?” The U.S. media landscape now resembles something out of Starship Troopers. It’s disgusting.
The ghoulish parade continued a week later when U.S. Special Forces dropped a 21,000-pound bomb out the back of a cargo plane in Afghanistan. The ensuing explosion killed 36 Islamic State fighters. Fox and Friends set the attack to music.
A segment of the noxious program opened up with footage of the bomb exploding over Afghanistan while Toby Keith sang “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” Host Ainsley Earhardt immediately upped the horror.
“That video is in black and white but that’s what freedom looks like,” she told special guest Geraldo Rivera. “That’s the red, white and blue.”
Fuck off, Earnhardt. Fuck off, CNN. Fuck off, Fox News. Fuck off, Bill Maher. Fuck off, Rachel Maddow. Fuck off, television news. You’re the broadcast equivalent of the lead in the pipes of the Roman empire.
War is horrible. People die. Even the generation who returned from World War II — the so-called “good war” — knew this. Soldiers flew across the world, fought fascism and watched their friends die and worse. They understood the cost of.
Now, their children and grandchildren stare at idiot boxes as well-paid pundits ooh and ah over pretty explosions and talk about the beauty of missiles. This is war from a remove. It’s war experienced by proxy and T.V. news is the low-information, high-emotion vector by which it spreads.
At the birth of television, studios considered the news a public-service loss-leader. The government licensed the airwaves to companies and in exchange those companies broadcast the news. Men such as Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite became trusted sources of information.
Then, sometimes in the 1980s, companies decided the news should turn a profit. The change was slow, but dramatic. We now live in an era where — at best — news stations repeat stories they cribbed from newspapers and — at worst — babble over graphics while waiting to sell you Pepsi and life insurance.
Worse, mainstream T.V. news pundits now seem dead-set on reinforcing Trump’s bad behavior. Trump is a national nightmare and his theatrics in Syria in Afghanistan do not make him president. They betray a deep level of arrogance and ignorance of how air strikes work and of the purpose of air-fuel bombs.
But pundits on the left and right took to the air in the wake of the strikes and cooed about how it made him president. T.V. news is the only news Trump watches and now he knows that blowing stuff up makes the pretty people on the boob tube say he’s cool.
Fucking great.
To be clear, this isn’t a problem restricted to Fox News and the right-wing media empire. The more centered and left-wing news sources have their own problems. Human smarm machine Rachel Maddow toyed with her audience for an hour in the middle of March 2017 when she promised to reveal one of Trump’s tax return.
After the White House scooped her in real time, Maddow revealed a normal rich-dude tax return and the audience rolled its eyes. But she made gangbusters ratings and increased her ad buy for MSNBC.
Bill Maher’s HBO show is an interesting salon of T.V. pundits, politicians, academics and celebrities. It can be fun when Maher doesn’t hijack the program to tell transgender people to sit down or violently attack religion with the willful ignorance he often accuses believers of fostering.
It’s telling that John Stewart’s The Daily Show became young America’s most trusted news source. As the weight of the world slowly crushed Stewart over the years, audiences at least knew he wasn’t bullshitting them. He shrugged his shoulders, pointed at the increasing pile of bullshit that made up public discourse in America and sighed. Towards the end, he looked how we all felt.
Stewart’s heirs Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah and John Oliver do better. Well, Bee and Oliver do. Their late-night cable shows tell jokes and rip stories from the news but they also take the time to do deep dives in confusing subjects such as gerrymandering and rape-kit processing. But they still have to tell jokes and play to their audiences biases to get people to tune in.
That’s where we are in America now. The newspapers are dying and the television news has to entertain us or we won’t watch. The trusted sources are comedians with obvious biases and the mainstream sources hide their biases while fawning over war footage.
Fuck them all. Stop watching television news. And stay defiant.
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