We hate each other and its Ted’s fault

“A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.”

Mark Twain

NO, not THAT Ted – Ted Turner. Let me explain. So much has been spoken and written about the giant divides in our country today – rural vs urban, blue vs red, liberal vs conservative, evangelical vs non-evangelical, now even vaccinated vs non-vaccinated. In a thoughtful article published earlier this year, Jonathan Zimmerman from the University of Pennsylvania discusses this schism. He examines the issue from the perspective of the George Floyd murder and subsequent unrest that rocked the country thereafter. He specifically called out Fox News and MSNBC as both being sources that gave out skewed and incomplete coverage of the event, presenting partial and incomplete facts in such a manner as to validate the worldview that they favor. His point was that we can never have meaningful discussions of our problems while we are constantly being fed partial truths and occasionally bald-faced lies to scare the heck out of us.

Why would they do this? Why do they want us scared? Don’t the people who control these enterprises love our country and want the best for it? Call me naïve but I think for the most part they do. (Well, maybe not the Murdocks). But they are commercial enterprises. They have a mission to present the news, but they also are on a mission to make money for their owners and/or shareholders. I think it is all Ted Turner’s fault. Turner was the founder of Cable News Network (CNN) the world’s first 24/7 news network in 1980.

In the “good old days”, Walter Cronkite presented the news for CBS at 5:30 each day for thirty minutes. Ohh, he might extend his stay if there were some sort of national crisis or historically significant event like the assassination of JFK or the Apollo space missions. This was also true of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley over at NBC and Peter Jennings, Howard K. Smith and others for ABC. In those good old days IF you lived in a metropolitan area or were really lucky (and the weather was good), you could choose from any of the three. In our rural area we first had CBS, KELO television Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and if the weather was just right, ABC from KTIV television in Sioux City, Iowa. Pop could occasionally twist our rabbit ears around and pull in the John Deere Bandwagon show from KEYC in Mankato on a Saturday night, but all of that is another story.

My point is that while I am certain there was a certain amount of competition from the networks, news occupied only thirty minutes of the network’s broadcast day. And I am also certain that while they had paying sponsors, news revenue was NOT the networks’ major source of income. Many if not most of the people in those days relied on the print media more than broadcast news as well. There we had TWO whole choices, the Associated Press (AP) and the United Press International (UPI). Some in those days felt that CBS had a more liberal bias than NBC but for the most part news was not perceived as being biased or even slanted by any of the networks. Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Edward R. Murrow and their colleagues were admired by most and some would say even revered. What a contrast to some of the self-serving hucksters that pollute our airwaves now and what a contrast those days were to the food-fight that is today’s broadcast media scene.

What happened? Like I said Ted Turner wrecked it all. In the late 1970’s cable television became available. Ted needed to fill up twenty-four hours of programming with SOMETHING and he had to compete with fifty or sixty other channels on the cable list. So, whatever his producers decided to air needed to be compelling. Because face it, a lot of times the news is kind of, boring. I mean who really cares about what was said at some arcane House subcommittee? So, the news had to be SOMETHING that really caused us to divert from the Beverly Hillbillies reruns on the other cable channels. It needed to not only be news, but it needed to be sensational to hold our interest twenty-four seven. So gradually everything became more sensationalized even if it wasn’t sensational. Every storm was the WORST with HUGE amounts of damage (even if we saw the same overturned mobile home twenty-five times every hour). And every demonstration had the potential to change the world. If any violence occurred, we were again showed the same thirty second clip over and over and over again. All of this was designed to capture a market share, to impress advertisers all to MAKE MONEY. And my goodness CNN certainly did that. He made so much money that Ted could afford to marry Jane Fonda!!

And there is a funny thing that happens in America. If we observe someone making money doing something, it invariably occurs to us that we could make money doing something similar if we can differentiate ourselves enough to claim a share of the market. Thus, Fox News, MSNBC, OAN etc. etc. came along all trying to carve out their own market share and their own viewer base. They apparently found that telling people what they want to hear is a good way to do that. And now telling the whole truth takes a back seat to making sure that they don’t offend their listeners. Did the proliferation of these news outlets create the tribalism that now infects our society or were they a reflection of the malaise that infected us for other reasons? Clearly there are a lot of aspects to our culture that have brought us to where we are today, but I think its mostly Ted’s fault.