End of…Facts
/By Don Varyu
Jan 2024
ver the last century, America’s primary preference for news has evolved several times. Newspapers, once dominant, gave way to radio. Then broadcast TV eclipsed radio. Then news on those airways bowed to cable TV networks—which, in effect, diluted actual news with endless, repetitive “takes”. Then the internet violently exploded this tendency, and now, an overwhelming number of Americans—especially young ones—have rejected all prior sources in favor of finding out “what’s up” on social media.
This may seem like just another inevitable change, but it’s not. And here’s the difference: before the Internet, all prior platforms had one fundamental thing in common—they employed trained journalists.
With social, that’s over.
News on social media too frequently consists of what people heard, what they think, or what they “feel.” There is no mandate that actual facts—gathered by actual journalists—play any part in this processs. We’ve written previously about “news deserts”—vast stretches of the country where no local news reporting exists at all. Less recognized is the decimation of “beats” on the local newspapers that still exist. There simply is not enough audience or advertising revenue to keep all those previous beat reporters employed. Consequently, in small towns and even large cities, there is no manpower available to find out who’s dumping what into the river, or which local politicians are on the take. And that’s also true in the converse; who are the good corporate citizens, or the reliable and even courageous elected officials, who deserve positive recognition?
All this leads to two corrosive outcomes. First, and crucially, is the steep decline in the availability of facts. And second, a news environment fractured into a thousand different pieces means there is no widespread acceptance of what a fact really is. There are no more widely accepted sources as authoritative. “You got your facts? Fine--I got mine.”
At one time, most American homes could be identified by the evening newcast their family watched. Were you a (Walter) Cronkite house (CBS) or a Huntley-Brinkley (NBC) family? In practice, the choice was essentially meaningless…a matter of taste…because all three networks reported on the same list of available facts within the same rundown of stories. And their local news affiliates did the same.
Perhaps it would have been better if they diversified their reporter assignments so that there was more choice. But the competitive juices prevailed. Rule number one was, “whatever you do, don’t get ‘scooped’.” Thus, instead of reaching wider, those reporters went deeper, looking for the one fact on the same story yet to be uncovered. The result may have been less content diversity, but more facts.
Today, any fact can be disputed or discounted, and all soon devolve into opinion.
I’ll close by returning to the days of TV and radio dominance. In the 1930’s, the president of CBS was a man named William Paley. He was making so much money with his national radio entertainment empire that he could indulge in a moment of public service. And in that moment, he decided his network would also carry news. “Why should just let newspapers do that?” So what if it lost money; it was so little it didn’t matter.
Because of that decision, Americans became the first people to hear live reporting of World War II as events actually occurred. Rooftop reports from London during the Nazi bombing blitz, and from the D-Day invasion beaches, made heroes of broadcasts like Edward R. Murrow, Charles Collingwood and Cronkite. When 160,000 allied troops stormed those beaches at Normandy, Americans flocked around their radios the same way most of us did around our televisions on 9/11. Clearly reported facts were the heart of everything.
Decades later, Walter Cronkite would become the most famous journalist in America. And in the early 1970’s, he was asked to address his collegues during a cocktail party at CBS in celebration of a momentous landmark: broadcast news, for the first time in its history, had become a profit-making enterprise for its parent network. The words he offered were not what the executives had in mind. Cronkite raised his glass and said, “my friends and colleagues—now we’re f**ked.” He understood that a little profit would feed the hunger for more—and then more, and more, and more. News was no more a public service. It was a business.
On a national scale, some established titans, like the New York Times and the Washington Post and 60 Minutes and NPR continue to carry the torch for uncovering facts. And there are still local news areas of brilliance in places. They continue to demonstrate what journalism is supposed to be. They find out and report facts. But they are not so much bright beacons anymore…more like flickering candles.
In 2023, parent corporations imposed significant layoffs at ABC , NBC and Fox News. NBC made more cuts in the opening days of 2024. Meanwhile, American newspapers closed at the rate of two-and-a-half per week. And the Internet was not immune. Buzzfeed closed up shop. Vice Media filed for bankruptcy. All news entities complain about one thing: the defection of advertisers to Facebook and Google—places that don’t bother employing journalists.
Looking ahead, things seem even bleaker, thanks to artificial intelligence. Media critic Steve Pearce told Poynter,
“It’s hard to describe the ways in which I think the overall information environment will only get worse, and I think that generative AI for the next year is going to continue to pollute the amount of garbage that we’re basically swimming around in.”
AI scrapes the Internet for everything, and gives equal weight to something researched and reported by veterans at 60 Minutes as much as to the rantings of some online lunatic. Facts be damned.
The result is predictable. Facts increasingly are defined by the individual, not by the journalist. Numerous studies show that “news” consumers, particularly under the age of 25, will swear that what they know or feel is true. After all, “I saw it on TikTok.”
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