“In the year 3535, ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies. Everything you think, do, and say is in the pill you took today.” From In the Year 2525, written by Rick Evans.

There’s an old saying about closing the barn doors after the horses get out. This is not as much a metaphor as it is an axiom. It is what we do.

Our “24-hour news cycle” opened the door to a new form of pop journalism, which, if you think about it, always has been a lynchpin to our popular culture. When network teevee news started — well before satellites, portable live cameras, and Zoom — it ran 15 minutes a night during dinner time, and before the invention of “TV trays.” We ate our meals in the kitchen or the dining room with our brood and we had “family conversations.” Nobody had to look up from their dumbass smartphones, as they did not exist. In fact, network news started only a bit after Dick Tracy got the first two-way wrist radio.

That started to change when the network news expanded to an hour and added a bunch of prime time weekly “investigative journalism” programs. Shortly thereafter, the network owners abandoned their policy of viewing the news as a public service and started to monetize those divisions by pandering to humanity’s most basic instincts. What we used to refer to as the “news hole” (a print reporting thing) grew into a bottomless pit. So-called 24-hour “news” channels on cable teevee greatly enlarged that pit, which introduced the concept of quantum physics to the world of reporting.

Filling all that additional time and competing with other outfits to fill that time created a plethora of engineers of bullshit and speculation replaced facts. It’s as though all the news directors were replaced by Loki. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: Tomorrow’s Bullshit Today!” →