Do you watch the news? As you may have heard Scott Pelley of CBS’s 60 Minutes recently gave a commencement speech at Wake Forest University. Ewan Palmer of the Daily Beast wrote an article entitled MAGA Erupts Over ’60 Minutes” Correspondent’s Viral Warnings About Trump. You can read the article here. Palmer discusses the MAGA reaction to Pelley’s speech. He outlines the difficulties CBS and 60 Minutes in particular have had with the Trump Administration. In this article, as well as others, it is noted that Skydance Media is looking to sell CBS.
Skydance is looking to settle a $20 Billion dollar lawsuit with the Trump Administration instead of fighting it. On the face of it CBS would likely win easily in court. Skydance Media knows it needs the FCC to approve the sale of its license. They also know that the FCC is now likely to go where Trump points.
It is really any wonder why Scott Pelley would be expressing these thoughts? He sees the show he has invested so much of his life into being compromised. This is all to appease a wanna-be dictator for corporate greed. Fox News in its usual hypocritical style went after Pelley with Kayleigh Mcenany calling for Pelley’s arrest over his comments. This seems quite reflective of the whole MAGA ideal. Speech is free, as long as it is MAGA speech. In MAGA world the opposition is the enemy. They seem to delight in the idea that their enemies be hunted down, arrested, and locked up.
MAGA faithful claim to love America. Sadly their idea of America seems one where they and they alone have a voice. In MAGA America only certain people have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The rest of us in their eyes are beneath contempt.
Free speech has always been a hotly debated topic. Where are the lines between protected speech and hate speech. What is pornographic versus art. These items have long been debated. In my view a large part of the problem has come from the media itself. The media which talks at length about the importance of journalism and journalistic integrity. This is the same media which launched 24-hour cable channels filled with talking heads who had to fill the hours of slow news days. I’ve spent time watching the big cable news networks. They all have one thing very much in common and that is how to fill the time. If you are truly bored enough, spend a day watching any of them and you will see the same content on each show, hour after hour. They gladly pivot to a breaking story to break up the clear monotony of analyzing the same topic in a dozen different ways with a dozen different guests throughout the day. It really makes me long for the days when there were only three channels and national news was only 30 minutes per night.
Is It News?
To me it seems like we have less “news” and more opinion on these channels. I remember watching the local news as a kid. At the end of the six o’clock news a message would come up on the screen warning the following content was opinion. This made it clear to viewers of the differentiation. I would then see a person come on the screen to give their ‘take’ on a particular topic they felt the public should know about. Today I miss that warning label. I think a lot of cable news should be required to put up such warnings when they stray from simply reporting the facts to the point where the facts are being interpreted. I just feel that would be more honest. To me the moment the person talking about the news interjects their own ‘take’ it stops being news and shifts to opinion. They have every right to express that opinion; however, calling it ‘news’ feels a bit disingenuous.
In my opinion networks that want to have the word “news” in their name should be required to have a certain percentage of their coverage be simply the “news”. By that I mean no opinion expressed by those giving the news. It should simply be the facts as they are known. There is nothing wrong with adding reactions to that news by the various sides involved as long as both are represented equally in the coverage. Once they meet that percentage, any other content should be accompanied by that warning label that the following contains opinions that do not necessarily reflect the views of that network. Perhaps if we had this system in place people might feel more confident in what they call “news”. I also believe there should be consequences for organizations which push content that is proven to be blatantly false. To a point there are consequences. One example is when Fox News kept insisting the 2020 election was rigged and promoting crazy theories about voting machines being tampered with. These claims were proven to be completely baseless. Fox News ended up being sued and of course ended up settling. Sadly, they were not required to spend any airtime confessing to their misinformation. Fox News got away with simply losing money which they will make back quickly. The biggest impact felt seemed to be with personalities they fired of those who pushed these lies more aggressively. They then replaced those voices with others who were no better and no more committed to providing facts.
Is it really any wonder why too many people have shifted to getting news from social media. According to a Pew Research study in 2023 half of U.S. Adults reported getting news from social media at least some of the time. You can read the article and study here. On social media algorithms are going to feed you what you have already expressed interest in or at least it thinks you’re interested in. I have always thought of myself as a moderate. I have always made a point of trying to hear both sides of an issue. In my experience the truth tends to exist somewhere in the middle between what the right and the left tend to say it is.
On Facebook my feed went from showing posts from my favorite comic strips to lots of right-wing posts. I added friends who had right leanings. I now routinely see ads geared at gun holsters, meals ready to eat (MRE), and memes featuring right wing themes mocking left wing politicians. This happened very quickly after certain people were added as friends. Is it any wonder our world is becoming so polarized?
To me this again makes me long for the days when we had confidence in that person sitting behind the anchor desk reporting the nightly news.