Whenever a conservative gets nostalgic about the good old days, a liberal will invariably (and quite rightly) pipe up with a reminder that the good old days included a few, um, drawbacks: such as Jim Crow laws, vigilante justice, vicious bigotry and rigid barriers to women’s ambitions.
Now liberals such as the president and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, unhappy with the turbulent mood of the electorate, are at risk of developing a good-old-days mythology of their own. It suggests that the exploding number of media voices is a strain on democracy and an obstacle to informed debate — and that civility and consensus were easier to achieve before blogs, talk radio and cable TV.
Those of you who recall the 1960s and ’70s — an era punctuated by protests, riots, bombings and assassinations — might be surprised by this thesis. If Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and Frank Reynolds provided a steadying influence from their anchor perches at CBS, NBC and ABC, it was hardly apparent from behavior in the streets.
Yet President Obama warned graduates at Hampton University last weekend that with new technology like iPads, information is becoming a “form of entertainment rather than a tool of empowerment . . . . So all of this is not only putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy . . . . With so many voices clamoring for attention on blogs, and on cable, on talk radio, it can be difficult, at times, to sift through it all; to know what to believe; to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not.”
A week earlier at another commencement, Obama worried that “today’s 2 4/7 echo chamber” of news might “reinforce and even deepen the political divides,” noting that “most Americans used to get their news from the same three networks over dinner, or a few influential papers on Sunday morning.”
Bennet has been more direct in praising the old-time media oligopoly. “I believe we’ve lost something in this country because we don’t go home at night, turn the TV on, watch Walter Cronkite for half an hour, turn it off and get about our business,” he said in Colorado Springs. “Instead, this stuff is on all the time, 2 4/7, and I don’t care what cable channel you’re watching, they’re not transmitting information, they’re selling soap.”
Cronkite’s CBS sold soap and cigarettes, of course — at least until the tobacco advertising ban in 1971 — but somehow that’s all right.
Obama and Bennet understand, of course, that people didn’t begin insulting one another only with the advent of the Tea Party. In Obama’s earlier speech, in Michigan, he even included an amusing review of merciless insults traded in earlier eras, as well as a reminder that “politics has never been for the thin-skinned or faint-of-heart.” But both he and Bennet worry about Americans creating personal echo chambers in which they listen only to views that reinforce their own.
Yet what is the evidence that people were more willing in the past to entertain differing viewpoints — or that network newscasts once provided a reality check for the alienated? Dissident movements in previous eras had little trouble creating echo chambers, too.
Besides, it’s actually far easier, not harder, for Americans these days “to figure out who’s telling the truth and who’s not.” They can call up documents on their computers, track down testimony, read court opinions, download videos and photos, double check facts through old news stories, and compare multiple sources. They needn’t rely on a solitary correspondent such as Walter Duranty to assure them, as he did while working for The New York Times in 1933, that “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” Cellphone photos would flood the Internet with proof of Duranty’s lies.
As someone whose profession has been rocked by technological change, I suppose I should be grateful for tributes to what has been lost. But like many tales of the good old days, this one is mostly self-serving myth peddled by those alarmed by the present.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
