Bring Back Fireside Chats
Today I am taking you on an adventure to high school English class. I promise there’s a greater point to this than just a literary walk down memory lane.
I read William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Mr. Brown’s 10th grade honors English class. Being the nerd that I am, I loved it. In fact, I love all things Shakespeare. To this day, almost 28 years later, I remember discussing the importance of Marc Antony’s speech at Caesar’s burial, and feeling enthralled with the idea of explicitly stating one idea, but implicitly intending for a different message to be delivered.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
Marc Antony was Julius Caesar’s loyal friend. Brutus pretended to be Caesar’s friend, but went behind his back to conspire against him, which ultimately led to Caesar’s murder. Throughout the speech, Marc Antony praises Caesar, remembering his friend fondly, while repeating this message multiple times:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
At face value, Marc Antony’s words are complimentary of Brutus, but throughout the speech, he implies that Brutus is a backstabbing asshole. He appeals to the crowd’s emotions, rather than intellect, and is able to instill their doubt in Brutus.
Okay. Get ready. Here’s my point:
This sub-story is a metaphor for today’s news cycle. Wait, what?
As I have mentioned before, I read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American every day. Dr. Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College. She reviews multiple new sources on the regular, and pulls the important content together into one place, where I can read and digest information without being subject to sensationalizing.
In yesterday’s letter, Dr. Richardson discussed the two Americas, stating “How people think about the country depends on the stories they hear about it.” She used two examples; how people perceive the state of the economy and how they feel about the January 6 insurrection. Political leaning has something to do with this, of course, but I think the real culprit is the media.
The above quote summarizes my point perfectly. So much news coverage now is about representing both sides of an issue or dramatizing a story for ratings. But sometimes it’s just fucking raining.
I attribute this demise in journalism to the 24 hour news cycle, which was created by Ted Turner, founder of CNN, in 1980. Originally, the intention of this format was intended to expand news coverage to bring smaller stories to light - things that might be sacrificed or overlooked due to time constraints. But as networks struggled to fill air time, factual content became diluted with “an increase in opinion pieces and a conflation of news and commentary.” When I Googled “24 hour news cycle” to find some good resources for this blog, here are a few headlines that appeared:
How To Stop Letting the 24 Hour News Cycle Control Your Life
Anxiety and the 24 Hour News Cycle
Headline Stress Disorder
How the News Is Impacting Your Mental Health
Here’s How to Deal with Trauma from the News Cycle
What the actual fuck? If these headlines are any indication, the way current events are reported to us directly impacts our mental health in a negative way. Think about the absurdity of this. Paying attention to what is happening in the world is literally bad for our health.
Consuming the news - whether watching, listening, scrolling, or reading - is like listening to Marc Antony’s speech. The words are telling us one thing, but are presented in such a way that our emotions are tugged in multiple directions through constant overstimulation. Think dramatic headlines, teasers before commercials, the ticker at the bottom of the screen, or breaking news updates during a football game. We can no longer believe what our reports and anchors have to say so we live in a perpetual state of vigilance, trying to understand what the hell is going on. We are being manipulated constantly.
I don’t know about you, but I long for the days of Fireside Chats. During FDR’s presidency, he spent time in the evenings, chatting with the American public over the radio. He provided updates on “economic policies of the New Deal, drought and unemployment, to Europe’s battle with fascism and American military progress in Europe and in the Pacific during World War II.”
As frightening as all of those things must have been back then, there was likely some comfort in hearing this information directly from the President of the United States, trusting that he was providing accurate information.
Regardless of sources today, we simply don’t have that level of faith. And that is what makes us all crazy.
