I grab the remote and go to the PBS Newshour. And yes, I’m a liberal—or some kind of democrat socialist utilitarian crank. Because I think that public money (tax dollars) should be used to improve public life and, in utilitarian terms, “to provide the greatest good for the greatest number.” And I think PBS is one of those “good” institutions that should not be beholden to private interests. But that’s not why I watch it.
I watch the PBS Newshour (from here on out, the Bad Newshour) for its thorough coverage of the latest failings of our civilization. For the scandals, disasters, crimes, wars, abuses of power, class conflict and sundry forms of morbidity, mortality and stupidity afflicting people worldwide. Because, like anyone else, I’m hardwired to overcome adversity, avoid pain, organize chaos and secure the tribe’s support. And what makes the Bad Newshour so entertaining is that it’s all about what’s wrong with the world. The focus is keenly catastrophic.
These catastrophes may not directly affect my life. However, like westerns and Greek tragedies, they remind me that existence is unfair. It can randomly reward and punish. A despicable person can become a president, and a kind, hardworking person can lose his family and end up in a gulag or get caught up in a war. The Bad Newshour spotlights the inconsistencies of human existence, the suffering of the undeserving and the reality that we all suffer a bit, mostly in private.
It’s only when the show tries to do good and report on culture and the arts that it becomes unbearable. The ameliorative intent of the cultural programming, the idea that art will heal the violence, greed, environmental destruction, disease, famine, poverty, ignorance and political chaos is naive. It makes me feel like I’m in that bingo scene in Better Call Saul.
Fortunately, they put the spirit-lifting, ameliorative crap at the end of the show, after they’ve shown you the world as rotting corpse. After Epstein, Trump, Musk, Diddy and the power-mad dictator of Equatorial Guinea. After the Potomac River mid-air collision, Southern California wildfires, Myanmar earthquake and Texas floods. After the school shootings, MAGA killings and other indiscriminate acts of death and destruction.
One of my earliest recollections of the Bad Newshour was in 1973, just before it got its start as the The MacNeil-Lehrer Report, when PBS covered the Nixon impeachment process. I remember seeing some of it on our lousy black-and-white television. The adults in the room were laughing. I didn’t fully understand the political implications. Nor did I see what was so funny about what seemed a serious business: a president who lied. All I knew was that, like me, he couldn’t lie for shit.
Little has changed since America was supposedly great. The president lies, but a lot more. And there are more delivery systems spewing his lies nonstop. When I was a kid, you had to be in front of a TV on the right day in the right decade to catch the president in a lie. Today, you’re never without a way, day or night, to hear him exercising his demagogic mendacity.
For kids these days, who get a lot more information that I did at their age, the president lies because that’s what presidents do. They use the word Diddy as both an adjective and a verb. I heard a kid on the playground randomly shout, “Hunter Biden’s laptop!”
Phones, TVs and computer screens are everywhere, incessantly demanding our kids’ attention. Yet studies show that, despite this proliferation of media, “increased screen time can lead to emotional and behavioral problems, and kids with those problems often turn to screens to cope.” Like a drug, the more they do the worse they fare, and the worse they fare the more they do. A windfall for the digital-dope dealers.
Despite the proliferation of media outlets, we see a decline in the quality of our cultural product. Great theories, formulas, songs, laws, buildings, shows and books are occurring at a slower pace than ever before. Culturally, we’ve contracted since 1973, despite the astronomical growth of technology and the delivery systems of culture.
Because works of genius are comprehensive and summary, not profuse and chaotic, they do not issue from quantitative forces, such as technology. They tend to communicate relationships (e.g., mass-energy equivalency) instead of facts. As Baudelaire said, “Art flees the details.” Science, literature and philosophy, too, are reductionist.
The news, on the other hand, is quantitative. It’s comes at you raw, unprocessed, senseless. It’s designed to excite the amygdala, and is therefore either disastrous or political. (By political I mean that it tells you how to react in support of a particular ideology.) The left urges you to react with sympathy and generosity; the right urges you to react with condemnation and punishment. Mr. Square and Mr. Thwackum in the same old argument.
The effect of technology on media is quantitative. A tractor plows more acres. A factory produces more widgets. A computer processes more data. Wireless transmissions deliver more media. More media deliver more information.
The effect is that we are mired in plenitude. Eventually, quantity obfuscates quality. We lose the qualitative standards of culture to popularity, that is, the rule of many. Sure, the great works are preserved in museums, libraries and institutions of learning, but they cease to be generated in the present.
In the Dark Ages, the church preserved works of genius. Today, the universities do. Meanwhile, the cultural literacy of the general public declines. Philistinism takes over and people lose the ability to derive meaning from great cultural works.
But fear not. This burial of quality in quantity will become increasingly painless as life becomes more meaningless. As the brave, new, quantitative world delivers more ads and charges more people to make them go away. There will be much more to pay for, more ways to pay for it, and more strategies to make you to pay for it. Eventually, ad-free content, quality reporting and honesty will have no place in our world. Eventually, the Bad Newshour will be relegated to history. That is, a subject of study.