Pasty, Pudgy, Ill-Nourished

      The problem with what passes for "news media" these days is the same kind of thing as the problem with snacks.

      You could have an apple or an orange, a handful of nuts, even some plain popcorn -- but the shelves are full of chips and candy bars and pastries with an amazingly-long shelf life, all nicely wrapped up and ready to go.  Why mess around rinsing off a kumquat or peeling a tangelo when there's Sugary Goodness™ just waiting?

      Likewise, the news used to be readily available in columns of dry text with the occasional map, chart or monochrome picture, thrown on your doorstep with the ink still damp every morning (and evening, in the larger towns and cities).  Or you could get it in five-minute chunks at the top or bottom of the hour, read by a professional with one eye on a stopwatch and the other on the entire world, a few concise lines for war, flood, fire and pestilence with a heartwarming "kicker" at the end unless they ran out of time.

      Mostly, what you got was news, because they had neither time nor the column-inches to deliver much else.  Oh, there was editorial content as well, on its own page or in its own time slot and clearly marked.  That's not to say the news content was entirely unbiased; the providers had to fit it into the available room, they had to pick what would lead off the newscast or the front page, and everyone involved was human: every news story is a story and every story has a point of view.  They had to stick to the facts; lies took too much effort and the competition would pick them apart.

      But it was fresh fruit and vegetables, and no ranch dressing.  The rise of 24-hour news stations, first on radio and then on cable TV, meant there were vast amounts of time to fill.  The Internet made for unlimited "pages" of newspapers -- and as newspapers put themselves behind paywalls to make up for lost revenue, plenty of new websites emerged to fill the gap, free for nothing but a mish-mash of weird ads onscreen.  And a lot of it was the junk food of news.

      I loved the "newswheel" format, a never-ending succession of newscasts, stories updated as they happened, but it was labor-intensive and the ratings plateau at "meh" unless there's a war or worse going on; newsreaders don't build a strong following the way "news personalities" can, nor does a quick look at what's going on in the country and around the world bring out strong emotion in the manner that hammering away at a few hot topical issues will.  And if that necessarily erodes the distinction between news content and opinion content?  Too bad -- look how well it sells soap and cars and so on!

      And so now we have channel after channel, website after website of attractively-packaged fluff with a long shelf-life, loaded with addictive notions, filling but not nutritious.

      Eat too much junk food and you get fat.  Consume too much junk news and you'll get fat-headed.