Once the best in the world

More on how we got here...

We Americans, like any people, have a history of believing in falsehoods. Every people has its founding myths, for one thing. We want to believe the stories we learned in childhood about George Washington - the cherry tree and the silver dollar (before dollars existed). We're not so keen to hear that Washington brewed small beer or adopted military tactics he learned from Indians.

Similarly, we cherish Thomas Jefferson's lovely, high-flown words in the Declaration about the natural rights of all men. But we're not so interested in Sally Hemings and her descendants, who are now known to be related to TJ and possibly to be his direct descendants. Most of us white people had already chosen to ignore Jefferson's ignoble failure to observe his own principles and free his slaves from unconscionable bondage.

Further, at least when I was in school in the South, we glossed over the devil's bargain of the "Great Compromise". My teachers framed it in terms of federal representation in the Senate and the Electoral College, not also in the House of Representatives, where slaves were "represented" at a discounted, subhuman rate by the same white landowners who enslaved them.

Americans in the late twentieth century, however, started having trouble distinguishing truth from fiction about subjects that were less abstract and historical. The media abdicated any attempt to referee any fact that either side deemed "controversial".

I recall throwing out Time magazine for the last time in the early 1980s. Every story was balanced in the way of too-young Ivy League grads who thought themselves worldly for their experience putting the Harvard Crimson or the Yale Daily News to bed. The writers wrote he-said-she-said stories with a little verbal shrug at the end as if news were all just an in joke and we the readers could only be cool if we agreed to find it as funny as they so knowingly did.

As a young Ivy grad myself, I preferred the hard facts of some old, fat, bald guy in a polyester suit who chewed on cheap cigars and drank too much young whiskey, but who couldn't be fooled by a large vocabulary or common club membership. That old reporter might not even have gone to college, but he could write strong subject-verb sentences, and he was loyal to his readers' desire to know what actually had happened.

Other readers must not have noticed. They were probably busy watching TV news, and they didn't notice that the factual, responsible old school journalists epitomized by CBS were being replaced. Roger Mudd had a face for radio, and the culture was turning to superficial values that would reign supreme when Connie Chung did her turn as Dan Rather's co-anchor. (Rather himself pretended to be old school, but he was really a blow-dried blowhard, even if his desire was to report legitimate news.)

In any case, Americans lost their frontier skepticism in the face of the boggling beauty of TV productions and personalities. Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism that "the medium is the message" may not have been true in the infancy of television, but it had certainly become true.

In the face of anchors like Brian Williams and Katie Couric and celebrity, helicopter journalism even outside the studio, viewers lost track of facts among all the flash. And at every turn, Brent Bozell and his pressure groups were there to flay anyone who got off script into distinguishing lies from truth. Most Americans didn't notice, apparently, since most came to believe that the media was in fact biased in favor of liberals. The truth of course was that TV was biased in favor of good pictures.

But we were learning to enjoy being spoon fed. It was so much easier than getting up from the comfy chair.

Once our bullshit detectors were the best in the world. No longer. The world changed, and most of us didn't keep up.