Comment | Josh Hawley, senator-brand of the broken news business

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Opinion

Like a toddler banging his spoon on a high chair demanding attention, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) last week cast the lone vote to keep Finland and Sweden out of NATO. Adding Russia’s two militarily capable neighbors to NATO would somehow weaken US aggression against China, he said.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), senior and not always a member of the College, said, “Any senator who voted for Montenegro or North Macedonia to join NATO would be very strange indeed to deny membership to Finland.” And Sweden. That night, Hawley appeared on Fox News to receive Tucker Carlson’s blessing.

This 11th episode of Chris Stivalt’s new book, “Breaking News,” shows how the Senate used the Senate as a stepping stone for cable TV’s green room. On election night in 2020, a tsunami of viewer outrage washed over Fox News because it correctly predicted that Donald Trump had lost Arizona. Now today’s journalism has a problem of supply – that is, supply of artificial controversies.

“What did Trump say? What did Nancy Pelosi say about what Trump said? What did Kevin McCarthy say about what Pelosi said about Trump? What did Rachel Maddow say about what Pelosi said about Trump? What did Sean Hannity say about McCarthy?

George F. Will: How the Economics of the News Business Changed the News

But journalism has a demand-driven problem: Journalists assumed that news consumers wanted “more information, faster and better.” Now, instant communication through interactive media—video and television—provides what frugal consumers want.

More than half of Americans ages 16 to 74 read below a sixth grade level. Video, however, requires more than just eyes on screens. But such a passive medium cannot convey the idealized civilization. Our faith, says Stirewalt, “requires written words and a shared culture to understand them.”

In the year New printing methods in the 1830s greatly reduced the cost of cultivating a culture of literate newsreaders. In the year In the 1930s, however, radio was more transformative than it had paved the way for: television, Stirewalt says, became an emotionally absorbed alternative to the drudgery of comparing literacy.

Technology—radio, television, the Internet—has turned journalism from reporting what happened to reporting what is happening, and now gives people news consumers the emotional experience of validating their political beliefs. “In 1983,” Strewalt reports, “the percentage of Americans who got their news from television Alone It predates all newspaper usage,” offering a “hands-on, more emotion-based product.” “Television news can be more emotional than the written version, and it doesn’t require as much cultural knowledge or challenge it. … inner thoughts

David Von Drehle: Just when you thought Josh Hawley couldn’t lay low…

Between 2004 and 2020, a quarter of US newspapers disappeared. Today it is much easier to find national news than local news; This encourages the belief that the national government is very important. It is in this context, Stirewalt says, that national journalists accept a moral obligation to “go to war” with the president: “Bigtime news dove in the clay with Trump, where he has home field advantage.”

The time was ripe for Twitter. Stirewalt describes the platform as “both devaluing journalism by dribbling coverage in endless gossip, but also by creating a larger echo chamber of self-esteem for reporters to realize their own importance.”

Technology has made journalism and politics more efficient, demeaning both, showing grandeur on the Senate floor and self-congratulatory cable news. Somewhat surprisingly, says Stivalt, “the news business treats politics like a sport” — entertaining but less meaningful than the results.

Jonathan Caphart: Josh Howell’s Masculinity Problem

The fans, consumers of emotional impact journalism, wear, figuratively speaking, the colors of their teams – red shirts versus blue shirts. This journalism’s focus on politics rather than government – on power rather than exercise – makes players on the field, Stivalt says, “wanting to show off to the fans in the stands rather than trying to win the game.”

Thus, the main example of the politics that the new journalism promotes is Hawley. And his absurd voice on NATO expansion – spoon clenched in a child’s fist, banging on the high chair tray, “Notice me!” he said. Hawley, aka The Sprinter (video of him running through the Capitol, evading the Jan. 6 throng) is senator-as-symbol: state the news, and that’s the sort of newsmaker you get.

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