Back in the early 21st century, before he was known as the Commander-in-Chief in the War on Terror, President George W. Bush had a dilemma on his hands: How — and whether — the federal government would fund research using embryonic stem cells. On the one hand, such research seemed promising as a way to provide cures to diseases that had stubbornly resisted the efforts of medical science. On the other hand, those embryos were human embryos — and Bush’s pro-life beliefs (and constituents) suggested that such research involved the destruction of human life.
Bush ultimately came up with a split-the-baby (no pun intended) solution: Research could proceed on existing stem cell lines, but federal money couldn’t be used to create or do research on new lines.
This was all very complicated. And at CBS News, anchor Dan Rather did something unusual: He threw up his hands and literally1 told viewers to go read a newspaper.
“It’s the kind of subject that, frankly, radio and television have some difficulty with because it requires such depth into the complexities of it. So we can with, I think, impunity recommend that if you’re really interested in this, you’ll want to read in detail one of the better newspapers tomorrow.”
I’ve been thinking about that moment the last few days, as folks on the left grapple with CNN’s apparent decision to let go of some high-profile personalities in an apparent bid to appeal more to conservative viewers:
CNN parted ways with veteran White House correspondent John Harwood on Friday in what network insiders viewed as the latest evidence of a shift to a less politically charged tone under new leader Chris Licht.
Several current and former CNN employees who spoke with The Washington Post — most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly — are interpreting the sudden exodus as evidence that Licht, who joined the network as chairman and CEO in May, is starting his tenure by casting out voices that had often been critical of former president Donald Trump and his allies, in an effort to present a new, more ideologically neutral CNN.
My lefty columnist friend Will Bunch sums up the reaction from that side of the aisle:
I’m more inclined to go with Conor Friedersdorf’s reaction:
Full disclosure: My career has been primarily in print and text-based digital media. It’s how I make — and have made — my living. I have a bias.
But I firmly believe this:
If you want to understand the world, you should read the news.
If you want to feel emotions about the world, watch the news.
This isn’t a perfect rule, of course.2 An episode of Frontline on PBS can do wonders for one’s understanding of an issue and its context. And sometimes a good newspaper story will fill you with rage or — less often — joy.
Mostly, though, you’re probably going to have a better understanding of what’s going on if you you’re reading your news than watching it. Here’s a study from 2020:
Researchers created an index of high, middle or low political knowledge based on how many of these nine questions respondents got right (high knowledge answered eight to nine questions correctly, middle got six or seven right and low got five or fewer right; see here for more details of the political knowledge index). While at least four-in-ten individuals who turn mainly to news websites and apps3 (45%), radio (42%) and print (41%) for news fall into the high political knowledge category, the same is true of just 17% of those who turn most to social media. Only those in the local TV group scored lower, with 10% in the high political knowledge category.
Looking at the chart above, you can see the real dropoff in “high political knowledge” comes when you shift away from text and audio and to video as the primary source of news.
Why? I think TV news — and cable news in particular — is more oriented toward entertainment than information. I recapped some of this4 back when Chris Matthews resigned from MSNBC:
"When Matthews' program was first shown in 1994, on the short-lived America's Talking channel, it was called In-Depth, a name that already sounds quaint," The New York Times reported in a 1998 profile of Matthews.
Instead of depth, Matthews offered his audience a show — political news as entertainment, American Gladiator, but with suits and ties and a sense of its own importance. "The gladiatorial combat that gives Hardball its faintly sadistic appeal is not, interestingly, between the guests but between the host and his guests," the Times observed. "Matthews is a gleeful warrior, by turns mocking, witty, high-minded, and bullying. Even if he doesn't know more than his guests, he can generally out-argue them; and when he can't do that, he can just talk them into the ground."
The combat was the point of his show, not understanding. And cable news has only become more that way over the last 20 years. It’s had a devastating impact on our politics.
To maintain its dominance in the post-Ailes era, the teams working on Fox’s evening lineup began to make wider use of expensive ratings data known as “minute-by-minutes.” Unlike the “quarter-hour” ratings more commonly used in cable newsrooms, which show how each 15-minute “block” performed, the minute-by-minutes allow producers to scrutinize an audience’s real-time ebb and flow. Mr. Carlson, determined to avoid his fate at CNN and MSNBC, was among the network’s most avid consumers of minute-by-minutes, according to three former Fox employees.
Most strikingly, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” began devoting more and more airtime to immigration and to what its host depicted as the looming catastrophe of demographic change.5 “He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up,” said another former Fox employee, who worked frequently with Mr. Carlson.
Tucker’s mission is to poke and prod — because it’s good for ratings, good for business — not to inform or enlighten. Judged by that standard, he’s been a smashing success.
Arguably, the new bosses at CNN are trying to get away from these kinds of dynamics. Or maybe they’re just being cowards in order to broaden their appeal. I don’t really know. It doesn’t really matter.
What I do know is that if network completes the shift it’s trying to make, it will still be TV news. There’s only so much of a shift it can makeI don’t expect the new CNN to be a much better source of information than the old CNN. Want to know stuff? Go read the better newspapers.
Odds and ends
My friend Damon Linker mentioned me Friday at his Substack, Eyes on the Right, and a number of his readers popped over and subscribed to this newsletter. Welcome!
Top o’the pops
And controverisally: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-08-13-0108130124-story.html
How this gets applied to my own life and work: I don’t like getting riled up, so I try not to watch live news events all that often. I skipped Biden’s anti-MAGA speech this week, for example, and then read the text later. This puts me at a bit of a disadvantage — the context of the optics, like the red lighting and Marines in the background, is clearly important. But it lets me control my reaction to these events a little better, which I think helps me be a little more cool-headed in my thoughts about them. I can’t always do this: Some things demand real-time viewing. Emotionally, the first Biden-Trump debate in 2020 was a complete nightmare for me.
This would seem to suggest you’re better off reading CNN.com than watching CNN.
This topic may be an old hobbyhorse of mine.
Admittedly, one danger for text-based news in the digital era is that editors now have this same kind of data, whereas earlier in my career — I’m old — all we really knew was how many subscribers we had. The incentives have changed in print media as a result, but I think generally speaking legacy newspapers and magazines, to the extent they’re still in business, haven’t yet slid entirely to pandering to the audience. Hit me up in five years, and this entire column might be irrelevant.