The More Things Change...

A friend recently posted an interesting observation about morning news in the first day or so after President Trump announced the United States would pull its troops from Syria. The interesting thing was that CNN -- a network which is, we might charitably say, ambivalent whether or not the president should be impeached or impaled -- had heavy coverage and commentary on the pullout. But during the period my friend watched, Fox News -- an outlet which is, we might charitably say, ambivalent about whether to bow or to scrape to the president -- had very little coverage at all. Apparently a news event was a news event only as it suited the distinct purposes of the network.

I gave my own long-held response, which was that if the verb people used to describe their primary method of newsgathering was "watch" instead of "read," they would have a hard time convincing me they were well-informed. I'm a softy these days -- when I first said that I allowed for no such possibility.

Anyway, it stirred my memory of a Bloom County comic from 1985, which this journalism major enlarged and put on his desk:

Opus' soliloquy highlights how even thirty years ago the image-centricity of television news had a firm hold on its broadcast. Even though all three men who anchored the major networks' nightly newscasts had solid journalism backgrounds -- for all of their flaws each of them was more reporter than any 20 TelePrompTer muppets who torment airport travelers and waiting room patients today -- they were also each carefully crafted for their respective images.

If Berkeley Breathed were drawing this strip today, it would probably have a couple dozen panels to illuminate the wide range of choices Opus faced. And his closing panel might have had our intrepid penguin reading from a tablet instead of an actual dead tree newspaper.

But the outcome remains the same. The less work our brains have to do to acquire content, the less worth the content has -- be we primates or flightless waterfowl.