The News Is Not Netflix

“Remind me to write a popular article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.” 

- Robert Heinlein, Stranger In A Strange Land

There was no cable news, CNN, FOX, MSNBC when Heinlein wrote this. You couldn’t consume news twenty-four hours a day. Now, news is one of the most popular shows on television. 

And therein lies the issue. The pandemic has trapped us in our homes and we turned to our screens: Zooming, gaming, and online communications took center focus, but so did watching more and more and more TV. Really, this was not startling. The trends were going this way since Netflix decided not to send people DVDs. 

It is not surprising that people would immerse themselves in distractions on several screens. People become very connected to the stories and characters in the shows they watch, regardless of the quality of the entertainment. Whether this is enjoying people screaming at each other during daytime talk shows, the exaggerated highs and lows of soap operas or the rush of a good adventure series, the power of the video story can be nearly addicting. 

So why shouldn’t we see the news as just another kind of story? There are fascinating characters, great conflict, high stakes, and engaging visuals. No wonder we like to elect television and movie personalities to public office! Perhaps we don’t see the difference – or we don’t want to see the difference. 

In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that, by presenting news through a medium that is best suited to entertainment, the gravity and complexity of the issues are diluted to such a degree that he refers to television news as “disinformation.” 

Similarly, in the 1976 Oscar award-winning movie, Network, the same idea is frighteningly dramatized as we see the conflict between journalistic television news, which is not entertaining enough to get good ratings, with an entertainment-focused news show that will do anything, including televising a suicide, to get people to watch. 

We are amusing ourselves to our democracy’s detriment. Today, our narrowcast news sources have gone far beyond what was satire in 1976! We watch the news with the same motives and engagement that we watch Tiger King, Squid Game, or Succession. The news is nothing more than another riveting television show. 

And we are the biggest fans! We look at our world through the perspectives, products, and spin of our news channels. There is no substantive difference in the way we consume the news than the way we interact with other television programming. 

Just as people name their children for media characters and personalities, we shape our choices around the feelings and fluff we get from the screen. We start to believe that the world really isn’t that complex. It can be reduced to a few quick sound bites from the anchorperson, legislator, or commentator. We trust these on-screen authorities for the same reasons we like watching actors in a fictional world: they look good, they sound good, they stroke parts of our self-image and make our drab lives more fun. 

Is that it? Could that be it? It used to be that watching Maury Povitch, Montell Williams, or Jerry Springer was a kind of schadenfreude. We got a perverse pleasure from watching others in pain. Now, our news has taken this a step further. We get that pleasure from seeing our political opponents in pain and our protagonist win every conflict –even if he didn’t really win. It’s all fiction anyway, so what’s the difference?  

It is not that different from following sports teams and, I fear, has about as much weight. Except that this team has far more influence over the fates of millions of people. We see ourselves as Team Republican or Team Democrat in the same way that we root for the Cubs or Cardinals, the Bears or the Packers. 

Political issues are hard to understand, so it is convenient that TV simplifies them for us. Politicians are masterful at manipulating facts and issues, so it is good to use the same tools to judge them that we use with fictional characters played by actors. 

Worst of all, we respond in similar ways: no one is asking you to save the character in danger during the series you are binging. Your vote doesn’t count for or against the fictional detective making an arrest or the lawyer in court on TV. 

But it does in the real world. When we are moved to action by our entertainment news, it is to play our roles in the drama we see unfolding. We get delusions of stardom and see ourselves as a piece of the story; we are characters in the tale, supporting our heroes and helping them vanquish our foes – if we are moved to action at all. 

Except the real world isn’t a story, and our heroes are fallible humans who are far more complex than comic book superheroes. Ultimately, all of the things we see on TV are trying to sell us something. They are not acting in our best interest – ever. By seeing the complicated and ever-changing world as a simple fable, perhaps one with a simple platitude at its heart, we become children again. 

The news is not Netflix. Politics are complicated. It is critically important to be aware of what is going on in the real world – but we have to be able to know what is real and what is just another made-up story. And taking political action is not as simple as posting on social media.