Sacred Trust or Engine of Profit, by Peter Coyote

Hick Planet magazine

tryna find the grownups table on a hick planet

an unperiodical:

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Thursday, 2019 November 28th

issue 1

For those readers who did not mature in the era of unadorned “news” reporting, delivered by dignified personalities like Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Cronkite, it is useful to know that there was once a period in American television when the news hour was respected and trusted. When Walter Cronkite soured on the Vietnam War, so did the nation. Each network news division was equivalent to the elegant hood ornament of a stately automobile, symbolizing the quality and probity of the corporate parent, a value-added component of the corporate logo, not an engine of generating profit.

A perfect America without conflict and compromise has never existed, but generally the news then was regarded as a sacred trust and had not yet included itself within “the establishment” to the degree that it is today. Most people in those years understood the news to be the critical matrix holding a functioning democracy together, insuring a common database on which to base policy deliberations. Indeed, how could an uneducated or misinformed public possibly understand the nuances of public policy, discriminate sincere from insincere candidates and good ideas from bad, if they did not understand the issues or have reliable facts for their analysis?

In the increasingly competitive decades of the 1970s and 1980s, networks began insisting that news divisions contribute to corporate coffers and, as a consequence, Donald Trump is president.

In Donald Trump’s case, the elevated audience numbers every time he made some outrageous and untrue claim justified the increased billings from advertisers and generated the vast plethora of Donald Trump airtime that vanquished his competitors and assured his electoral victory. Cable TV, the Internet, and blogs churn out reams of data, assertion, and falsehoods to the degree that it is nearly impossible to fight the tide of false information corrupting our public dialogues. “The news” has simply become an issue of personal taste and a badge certifying tribal membership.