Neil Postman Always Rings Twice
First as tragedy, then as farce
“Neil Postman is having a moment.”
I’ve heard this phrase in conversation at least four times in the last month. Postman’s most famous work, 1985’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, pops up in newspaper stories, books, and podcasts. The book’s argument that TV was dumbing down public discourse and turning all information into entertaining distraction has been proven correct so many times that the author now seems like a prophet.
When I wrote my own book about the hazards of technology (due out next year!), one of the first pieces of research I reached for was my paperback of Amusing Ourselves to Death, the second or third copy of the book that I’ve owned in my life.
We writers who reference Postman (WWRP) tend to apply Postman’s key points about television to our phones (and to the phones of other people…especially those phones). This is rich territory. The dominance of video online makes the comparisons easy. But Postman’s warnings were relevant to the web long before our current pivot to video. The dumbed-down discourse and desperate distraction that Postman saw in the TV news of the 1980s didn’t leap online with YouTube. It came in through news websites.
A few key points from Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Beginning with the telegraph, the fast transmission of information across long distances created “the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity.” This is inherent to mass media. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin quotes the founder of French newspaper Le Figaro saying that to his readers, “an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid.”
Postman writes: “Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.”
Postman spends a chapter on the phrase “Now…this.” Newscasters repeat it to mark the end of one report and the start of the next. “There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, ‘Now…this.’”
My path to being a WWRP began when I studied Postman in college. This was mostly limited to broadcast journalism classes. We watched a lot of local TV newscasts that proved Postman’s point. There were stations reporting on freak accidents from cities hundreds of miles away—irrelevant to the station’s audience except for the chance to show gruesome pictures that would be forgotten by the time the late show started. There were stunts that tried to make a dry story fun. Usually these involved visual aides and were done by either the station’s stock “wacky” reporter or the station’s “troubleshooter”—a name for a reporter who did faux-investigative stories that often solved one person’s problem but left an institutional issue unaddressed (because institutional issues are too complicated and thus never mentioned). And there were the constant stories built on fear, usually about something that would kill you—hot dogs, an ingredient in your household detergent, etc.
If other schools taught journalism this way, then a lot of students weren’t paying attention. When Michael Jackson died in 2009, I was covering a city council meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. As word spread, one of the TV reporters left the meeting before an important budget vote because he had to get video of kids moonwalking outside of a Q’doba across town.
Not long after, I noticed this same style of reporting online. Local TV news websites translated the broadcast to the web. They had shocking footage and terrifying tales of new deadly threats pulled from distant stations owned by the same corporate monolith.
Local sites that weren’t affiliated with TV stations did the same sort of thing—they ran stories that weren’t local and weren’t particularly enlightening, but were entertaining. Many local newspapers at that time had already been bought up by larger media groups, so they had a well of wild and entertaining stories from around the country to share.
Startup news sites soon copied this style. They ran blaring curiosity gap headlines that read like teasers from the local TV news. They shaped stories into easy-to-parse listicles. The economics of the web fueled an insistence on a national focus for every story, with reporters only visiting a community if it was the center of a controversy, the site of a disaster, or if there were some really great pictures. Sites embedded strangers’ tweets the way TV news would talk to a few onlookers and cut their comments into the final report.
This style owes some of its trashiness to print tabloids, too, but the point of a tabloid was to sell you a paper. The point of the website was to get you to click, and click again and again and stay in an ad-filled funhouse for as long as possible. This could be done by publishing stories about relevant topics that are written to be read in their entirety, but that’s costly and difficult. Instead, sites cluttered their columns with links to related stories, often inviting a reader to go look at something else instead of finishing an article. It’s the modern-age “Now…this.” No time to contemplate, no time to think. Just click and scroll.
It’s not surprising that the same techniques that got ratings on television would get clicks online. And I see why so many publishers went along with this strategy. The numbers are enticing. I worked in newsrooms in the early years of the social web, and it was easy to imagine that we were doing a public service. I know that as an editor I approved a few stories that made me silence my inner WWRP. When our ever-present Chartbeat dashboards showed a story was getting a lot of clicks, it felt like we had figured out some kind of secret code; we knew the formula to get attention. If we had to run a few silly stories in order to get traffic to our serious news website, so be it. If we had to make serious stories seem frivolous, then that was what it took to get attention. Over time, the distinction between the serious and the frivolous was impossible to see, let alone convey to the audience.
Times have changed. The clicky text and listy articles of the last decade is now Millennial Cringe. Everything is video…again. And it’s worse than it was before.
When TV news was dumbing down the discourse, there were alternatives. There were still people who read newspapers and magazines or had other ways to get information. There were still newspapers and magazines in existence. The fact that TV was popular and getting more popular was bleak, but there was hope.
The number of people who get their news from social media keeps growing. According to a Pew study, the platforms that are growing the most are the video-centric ones: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. WWRP tend to focus on this fact. We’re so distracted by this scrolling that we’re ignoring everything else. But what I find more bleak is the fact that any other way of getting information is vanishing.
Publishers who pivoted to podcasts five years ago are now making those podcasts into videos. News websites are full of videos of interviews and story summaries. GQ’s feature on David Letterman is a “video cover story,” essentially a long interview. This is fine if you want to listen to a conversation, but what if you want the analysis? What if you want to read words written by people who write professionally, instead of watching writers try to perform for cameras. Because video inherently requires performance.
When asked on The Press Box podcast about journalists having to hold their own against people who are camera-ready and media trained, Zach Baron, the celebrity profiler who interviewed Letterman for GQ’s video, essentially said journalists need to level up and learn to do something interesting. It’s valid advice. It’s also the same advice journalists get every time their industry changes. Weren’t the wacky TV reporter and the overserious, faux-empathetic “troubleshooter” both adapting to the medium? Adaptation seems like the only logical choice, until we’re presented with an adaptation that’s too perfect—too smooth, too camera-ready, too lacking in the qualities that made the old style strong. By the time that happens, the entire industry has already shifted. What happens when these news outlets that are sacrificing text for video get the clicks and ad revenue they’re chasing? Words, articles, analysis, and ideas will fall away into a sea of videos that play in a tab we’re not even looking at. Market forces will have made us all trade incisiveness for talkativeness.
And what happens if these videos don’t work? What if the numbers show that viewers drop out halfway through? Will there be any appetite to return to text, or will the videos just get shorter, more full of distractions, with new ways to keep someone entertained until the ads play?
Whatever happens, a new generation will find another way to say that Neil Postman was right.