He sees the media brimming with “gaffes, gotchas, spin-doctoring, celebrity pimping, crisis-mongering, minnow-brained punditry, drama criticism practiced from under the troll bridge and instant amnesia.” Wolcott suggests taking a look at the old “black and white TV' era of news. With “measured intonations and ashen visages,” those reporters were somber and responsible, conducting themselves as a “priestly caste serving the needs of an informed citizenry, as opposed to catering to cud-chewing dolts.”Nobody advocates a return to the “good old days.” Technology and the Internet have buried the anchorman as the “voice of God.” That old-school journalism, however, provided “coverage of the news with weight and authority, a fixed point in a sea of raging foam,” wrote Wolcott. “Now it’s all raging foam, a steady, indiscriminate diet of excitation to keep us permanently on edge.”
Wolcott slams home his “all is lost” point with a headline from the New York Times of Aug. 24, '08. It read “At conference on the risks to the Earth, few are optimistic” To pick up the Times each day, wrote Wolcott, “is to understand why generalized anxiety disorder is the world’s No. 1 psychological condition.”
And don’t get Wolcott started on science and health news. Medical coverage today makes people want to “roll out of bed in a fetal ball” and largely serves as the “happy hunting grounds of hypochondriacs.”
Kudos to Wolcott and Vanity Fair, which has another strong piece by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in which he offers a plan to “regain America’s economic sanity.”
(Image: Vanity Fair)