Last Tuesday I sat down at 7am with a pot of coffee and watched six hours of cable news across three different channels. I took notes. I kept a tally. I am going to share what I found with you because I believe in informed Americans and also because somebody has to do this and it might as well be Frank.
By noon I had counted 47 instances of a guest or anchor using the phrase "threat to democracy." I had counted 31 different graphics with urgent red borders and words like BREAKING or CRISIS or DEVELOPING even though three of those stories were about things that had happened four days ago. I had watched the same two minutes of footage played eleven times across different segments as if it contained new information each time it aired.
I had not learned a single fact I did not already know before I sat down.
What I had done was spend six hours in a state of low-grade anxiety punctuated by brief spikes of outrage followed by commercial breaks for medications with side effects longer than the original problem they treat. This, Frank realized, was not a bug. This was the product.
The business model is not information. The business model is attention.
Scared people watch more news. Angry people share more content. Confused people are easier to manage. These are not opinions. These are documented findings from the media industry's own internal research going back to the 1990s when the 24-hour news cycle was invented and someone realized that filling 24 hours with actual news was impossible but filling 24 hours with reactions to news, reactions to reactions, and speculation about future news was not only possible but enormously profitable.
The average cable news viewer watches 3.5 hours per day. The average cable news viewer also reports significantly higher rates of anxiety, pessimism about the country's future, and belief that violent crime is rising even when statistics show it is falling. This is not a coincidence. This is a feedback loop. The more you watch the more certain you become that everything is on fire, which makes you watch more to find out how bad the fire is getting, which makes you more certain everything is on fire.
Frank is not telling you the news is lying to you. Some of it is. But the more sophisticated problem is that it is selecting, emphasizing, framing, and repeating true things in a sequence specifically designed to produce an emotional state in you rather than an informed one.
Here is what Frank noticed watching all three channels simultaneously.
The same event, the same actual factual event, was described using completely different language, shown with completely different graphics, and surrounded by completely different context on each channel such that a viewer watching only one of them would come away with a genuinely different understanding of what had happened than a viewer watching another.
Not because anyone lied. Because framing is everything and everyone in that industry understands this better than you do.
The word protestors versus rioters. The word questioned versus attacked. The word controversial versus popular. None of these are factually wrong necessarily. All of them are choices. And those choices are made by people with advertisers, with corporate owners, with political preferences, and with a very clear understanding of which emotional state their specific audience wants to be in when they sit down to watch.
They are giving people what they want. What people want, it turns out, is confirmation that they were right and the other side is dangerous. Both sides. All channels. Every hour.
The Founders had something to say about this too.
Jefferson wrote extensively about the press. He believed a free press was essential to a functioning republic, more essential in fact than almost any institution of government. He also, later in his life, wrote that a man who reads nothing at all is better educated than a man who reads only newspapers, because the latter knows nothing but is full of wrong information whereas the former simply knows nothing.
Jefferson did not have cable news. Frank shudders to imagine what he would have written about cable news. Frank suspects the language would not have been suitable for a family publication.
The First Amendment protects the press because the press, at its best, is the public's primary tool for holding power accountable. That function still exists. It is just buried under seventeen hours of people yelling at each other about things designed to make you too angry to think clearly.
So here is Frank's actual advice.
Turn it off. Not forever. Turn it off for a week and notice what happens to your blood pressure, your sleep, and your general assessment of whether the country is salvageable.
Read primary sources. When someone tells you a bill does something, read the bill. When someone tells you a study found something, find the study. When someone tells you a politician said something, find the actual quote in context. This takes more time than watching someone on television tell you what to think about it. It produces an actual opinion rather than a borrowed one.
Get local. Your city council, your school board, your county commissioner have more direct impact on your daily life than the Senate. They are also dramatically less covered, dramatically less scrutinized, and dramatically easier to actually influence. Frank goes to city council meetings. Frank is usually the only person there who is not trying to get a variance approved for their fence.
And read the Constitution. Frank keeps coming back to this because Frank keeps finding that most of the arguments happening on television are arguments about things the document already settled, being had by people who have clearly not read the document.
Twenty-two minutes. Frank timed it.
The news is not broken. The news is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The question is whether what it was designed to do is what you actually need.
Frank needed six hours and a full pot of coffee to confirm what he already suspected.
You are welcome.
— Frank