Did 24-Hour Cable News Kill America?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
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Now, here's the episode for real.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:47)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:57)
Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And it's just two of us today. That's all right. Jerry is a very busy person with lots on her plate. We understand that fully.
But it's still Stuff You Should Know.

**Chuck** (1:11)
That's right. It is still Stuff You Should Know. And today, we are talking about cable news possibly ruining our country.

**Josh** (1:19)
I don't know that there's much possibly about it.

**Chuck** (1:22)
Yeah. You know, I never really thought about it.
I mean, I think about our country being ruined a lot.

**Josh** (1:28)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (1:29)
But I, you know, I never really thought a lot about like, what was the initial cause of stuff. But it's hard to not make an argument that cable news has been like 24 hour, 24-7 cable news coverage is what we're talking about.

**Josh** (1:42)
Yeah.

**Chuck** (1:43)
That didn't make a real dent in things.

**Josh** (1:46)
Yeah, for sure.
And like, there's study after study that just shows all the negative effects it has like, unlike a collective scale, on an individual scale, like it's just not good stuff. I looked all over, you can't really find these positive like studies on it. They're like, yeah, it's really good for this. I mean, I guess it does make you feel alive to some degree. But I think that's also kind of like trying to find the good in menthol cigarettes by saying they like make your throat feel icy when you're smoking them.

**Chuck** (2:21)
Yeah. And you know, I think if we're going to talk about this, a good place to start is sort of a brief little look at the old days. Before cable news was, you know, when you and I were growing up, there were the big three, CBS, NBC, and ABC News, or you know, the networks. And they had news shows that came on in the evening, and then like 6 or 6.30, and then 11
And that's where people got their national news. And it was reported on in a way where they just sort of said, here's what's going on in the world. Here are the facts of what's happening. And we all had a shared reality of what was going on, and you could kind of make up your own mind about it.

**Josh** (3:05)
Yeah. Shared reality is a great way to put it. And there has been lots of study about the importance of that too, right? So, like even if the people who are watching the news didn't agree with other people who are watching the news about, you know, what the solution was to this problem, they were still thinking and looking at the same problem, right?
That shared reality was a set of facts that everyone agreed like this is what's going on. This is the problems our country is facing. And then you have like an argument in the marketplace of ideas about, you know, what's the best solution and the best way to move forward, right?

**Chuck** (3:44)
Yeah.

**Josh** (3:44)
And when you have that kind of thing, people have, it was called a sort of social, cultural and political glue.

**Chuck** (3:52)
Yeah.

**Josh** (3:52)
That just kind of brought people together and very importantly, gave people a sense of a shared national identity.
Like people were all Americans, right? Everybody living in the United States were all Americans. Even though we don't always agree, we don't hate each other for being different necessarily. We are all at the end of the day Americans.

**Chuck** (4:13)
Yeah, for sure. And at the center of that glue, well, or maybe it was the glue, I guess, was that shared reality of, hey, we're all agreeing on at least the basic facts of what's going on.

**Josh** (4:24)
Right.

**Chuck** (4:25)
We did an entire episode on the Fairness Doctrine. It was released appropriately on July 4th, 2019 So if you want to go listen in-depth about the Fairness Doctrine, you can. But just sort of a quick overview for this purpose though, is the FCC here in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission was created in the early 1930s.