Clay details how cable news has long failed to reliably serve Americans, why he is tuning out, and what he’ll do instead.
The last day I watched anything on FOX, CNN, or MSNBC was Monday, November 4, 2024, the day before the last national election. That day, I decided to wean myself off cable news. During my summer travels, I listened to a great deal of pre-election news and discourse, at times obsessively. I was in Walla Walla, Washington when former President Trump was shot — across the country in Pennsylvania. I was in Montana when Joe Biden withdrew from the race. I listened to much of both parties’ national conventions in my pickup. I let myself be drawn into the incessant drama in the months before the election. It damaged my happiness, and, as they say, there was much more heat than light.
During the first Trump term, I joined millions of other American Trump-doubters in taking the bait every time. Every time Mr. Trump did something that broke an American constitutional norm or stomped on a traditional American value, I tuned in like Pavlov’s dog to seek some clarity, but mostly, I ended up hearing the outrage of the left. When I switched to FOX to see how things were faring there, I had to turn away in sorrow that we had reached this angry and bitter cul-de-sac in American life. Some evenings, when things were really squirrelly, I would watch five or six hours on the three prominent cable networks and go to sleep in something like open despair for our national experiment, now almost 250 years old.
I cannot do it again. I don’t have the will, the stamina, or the time to waste four more years lapping up the outrage of the day.
If my journey around the United States between April 27 and November 20, 2024, some 21,400 miles in 41 states, taught me anything, it is that America is much better than the “America” presented every day and night by the cable news giants. The America I saw is nicer, more respectful, more generous, more civil, more purposeful, happier, more decent, and more admirable than the cable projection of our national affairs. As I crisscrossed the country from “sea to shining sea,” as the late Stephen Ambrose put it, I witnessed a nation at full (if not always fairly compensated) employment; its highways and rail lines bursting with commercial traffic; a nation that generally takes good care of its waterways, its farmlands, its public domain; a nation of small businesses that somehow survive against the tsunami of gross corporate attempts to monopolize the American economy. I met people with a wide range of craft passions: guitar makers, master gardeners, ceramicists, musicians, leather workers, and artists (graphic and otherwise).
I did not see an America in decline. And lest you argue that I wasn’t looking hard enough at poverty, racism, sexual predation, a growing kleptocracy, or gross mineral extraction in the West, I am well aware of the lingering problems of American life, some of them fundamental. Frankly, I don’t trust either party to fix those things. The true enlightenment will burble up from the plateau of the tens of millions of reasonably well-educated people from the grassroots enlightenment of a nation that still reads avidly. More than 3 million books are published annually in the United States. The average American reads 12.6 books per year. Not bad. Keep reading!
Here’s Why I Won’t Turn To MSNBC, Fox, or CNN in the Next Years.
1. They are echo chambers, even CNN. FOX offers up an endless parade of grievances — against liberals, progressives, Democrats, the mainstream media, corporate America, the “deep state.” FOX presents the progressives (and all Democrats) as unpatriotic, anti-American, “socialist,” “Marxist,” and even communist. MSNBC invokes the idea that the opposition is “fascist,” racist, homophobic, sexist, and out of touch with the inevitable progressive trajectory of the country. (Some of this is sometimes true, but the labeling is as unfair as it is pointless.)
2. They present an apocalyptic picture of American life. “The sky is falling.” The sky is always falling on cable channels. But I’m a historian. We have a long and well-deserved reputation for muddling through. The resilience of the American spirit is one of the best things about us.
3. The irrational exaggeration of the national divide, the incessant hyping of extreme positions, and the endless demonization of the “other” (whatever it is) make political compromise much harder, and our system only works when there is compromise. The Founding Fathers wisely created a system of essential checks and balances. No one individual, faction, or entity in American life is permitted to dominate. If the media returned to the center and attempted to lower the national temperature, it might be easier to make the national government work again. These media giants distort; and the impressionistic public is lured into joining in on the distortion.
4. None of these cable networks make any attempt to present a thoughtful and balanced view of the American situation. CNN makes a feeble effort to present “both sides,” but poor Scott Jennings is routinely outnumbered and often belittled by his commentator colleagues. Take any issue: you know exactly what you are going to hear on FOX that evening and on MSNBC. I can predict what each pundit, each anchor, and each guest is going to say. Watch long enough on a single day, and you can expect the same experts to say the same things on two, three, or four consecutive programs.
5. MSNBC and FOX don’t just distort the national news, but their principal anchors and commentators have become grim and unsportsmanlike cheerleaders for their political views. Both sides. Republicans want Democratic administrations and Congressional majorities to fail — and vice versa. They positively crow at the failures and setbacks of the other party. No effort is made to try to understand where the other side “is coming from.” It is simply assumed that any deviation from the cable channel’s self-satisfied orthodoxy is toxic.
I don’t suppose there was ever a time when national media entities were truly objective and scrupulously fair. There has always been, I believe, some liberal bias to the way major media have covered America. But before the arrival of the FOX-MSNBC megaliths, most news entities tried to be fair. We were better off by far when the Fairness Doctrine governed the national media. The FCC made a terrible mistake in 1987 when it abolished the Fairness Doctrine, which had previously forced every FCC-licensed media entity to provide at least the appearance of political fairness.
My heroes in the national media have been Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Ted Koppel, Peter Jennings, Edward R. Murrow, William L. Shirer, Brian Williams, Dan Rather, Roger Mudd, and North Dakota’s great contribution to national media, Eric Sevareid. There were giants on the earth in those days. There are, today, some very distinguished national journalists, but the ones who get the most attention are mostly naked partisans, and some of them what might be called partisan hacks.
I want so much more. We deserve so much more.
Turning Away
My decision to wean myself of all this nonsense does not mean that I am opting for ignorance or escapism. I’m not planning to binge-watch the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City or the Andy Griffith Show. Every day, my smartphone delivers a steady stream of national and international news — more news, frankly, than any citizen of the Great Plains could have ingested even 15 years ago, no matter how hard she or he worked at it — and at infinitely lower cost. I subscribe to the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Economist. So, I am not likely now to be marooned on the island of social and political ignorance. I order virtually every new book that seems to reflect on the strange nativist populist turn of American (and world) politics: among these, Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism; Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America; Steven Hahn’s Illiberal America: A History; and Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Here are the criteria I intend to use as I decide what to ingest in our national media.
1. There must be some genuine effort to be objective, fair, balanced, and respectful of the other point(s) of view.
2. No cheerleading, no demonizing, no crowing, no grievance.
3. Politics (mostly) should end at the shore of the Atlantic and the Pacific.
4. Not every development is “BREAKING NEWS” with heroic music and iconography. BREAKING NEWS: MITCH MCCONNELL HAS A HEADACHE.
5. I want my commentators to be rational beings who are willing to admit that they are not always sure about everything.
6. As with good conversation, so with good media, I want commentators to try to show genuine respect for views not their own but views of the other party.
7. I want my media personalities to care more about America than about their party, faction, tribe, or television ratings.
I don’t expect American media to reform itself. The era when Walter Cronkite could be routinely voted the “most trusted man in America” is long over. Cable “news” plus the essential anonymity of social media plus the craven publicity-seeking of our least thoughtful politicians is a formula for steep national decline. We are better than this. We are not going to fix things by boycotting Budweiser or Disney World. We can only reclaim America by withdrawing our consent from the cash flow of the worst offenders. If CNN and MSNBC want me back, they are going to have to move to civility and the center. I believe I speak for millions of Americans in this.
Alternatives
Here’s another good reason to turn away from television — not just news and commentary but television altogether. (I freely admit that some very good television programming is out there.) There are so many books piled up on my bedside table, so many books stacked up next to my working desk, so many books languishing on my iPad that I ordered but haven’t yet read, not to mention so many classics of world literature that I have never read: Madame Bovary; One Hundred Years of Solitude; The Gulag Archipelago; The Mill on the Floss; Tolstoy’s The Gambler; Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure — a long and embarrassing list, including some whole areas in which (even in literature) I am shockingly ignorant and under-read.
As the new year begins, I’m about to read the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy for the first time since my college days. My friend Donald says Middlemarch is better than Dickens (the fool!) but I have placed it near the top of my stack. I haven’t read Don Quixote for many years. Plus, I make sure to re-read Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Walden, Huckleberry Finn, Roughing It, and a wide swath of Shakespeare’s plays every year or two. It’s time to re-read The Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost. I can listen to those books as I walk daily, another good reason to wean myself off video screens. We live in the great age of audio books.
No time to listen to Rachel or Sean or Lawrence or Tucker. There is culture out there! Culture more inexpensively available than ever before in human history.
We are better than we seem to be. However, since I cannot change the world or make it conform to my views, I plan to spend the next four years improving myself.