Let us examine the patient. Cause of death: the invention of a format that requires the human nervous system to remain in a state of perpetual emergency in order to sustain advertising revenue. The mechanism was elegant in its cruelty. Take something called “breaking news”; once reserved for events that actually broke something; and apply it to everything. The weather. A celebrity’s lunch. The President’s commute. A tweet about the President’s commute. The response to the tweet about the President’s commute. Every hour, a new emergency. Every emergency, a new reason not to look away. The patient did not die from lack of information. It died from being force-fed information until it forgot what information was.
At some point between Woodward and Bernstein and whatever this is, the profession forgot its job description. Not the lofty parts; the parts about speaking truth to power and comforting the afflicted; those it remembered well enough to put on coffee mugs. It forgot the tedious parts. The parts about showing up. About staying in the room after the cameras leave. About verifying something before publishing it. About being boring in service of being correct. The assignment was never to be interesting. Interesting is a byproduct of good reporting. The assignment was to find out what happened and tell people, accurately, in a way they could verify if they wanted to. Everything else; the brands, the personalities, the hot takes, the sponsored content disguised as journalism; everything else is just the funeral arrangements.
