of dollars for one man. But I do think CNN provides a service.
It does a fair bit of investigative journalism, which can uncover corruption and injustice that otherwise would go unchecked. Also, CNN does report the news, at least in a narrow sense—if it happened today, and if it was dramatic or scary or big, and if it happened in the U.S. or Europe, you will probably learn about it on CNN.
The word news tells a secret on itself, though: What’s news isn’t primarily what is noteworthy or important, but what is new. So much of what actually changes in human life isn’t driven by events, but instead by processes, which often aren’t considered news. We don’t see much about climate change on CNN, unless a new report is published, nor do we see regular coverage of other ongoing crises, like child mortality or poverty.
A 2017 study found that 74 percent of Americans believe that global child mortality has either stayed the same or gotten worse in the last twenty years, when in fact, it has declined by almost 60 percent since 1990, by far the fastest decline in child death in any thirty-year period in human history.*
Watching CNN, you might not know that. You also might not know that in 2020, global rates of death from war were at or near the lowest they’ve been in centuries.
Even when a news story does receive saturation coverage—as the global disease pandemic did on CNN beginning in March of 2020—there is often a preference for event-based stories over process-based ones. The phrase “grim milestone” is repeated over and over as we learn that 100,000, and then 200,000, and then 500,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the United States. But without context, what do these numbers even mean? The constant repetition of grim milestones without any historical grounding only has a distancing effect, at least for me. But when contextualized, the grimness of the milestone comes into focus. One could report, for instance, that in 2020, average U.S. life expectancy fell (much) further than it has in any year since World War II.
Because there is always new news to report, we rarely get the kind of background information that allows us to understand why the news is happening. We learn that hospitals have run out of ICU beds to treat gravely ill Covid-19 patients, but we do not learn of the decades-long series of choices that led to a U.S. healthcare system that privileged efficiency over capacity. This flood of information without context can so easily, and so quickly, transform into misinformation. Over one hundred and fifty years ago, the American humorist Josh Billings wrote, “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” And that seems to me the underlying problem—not just with CNN and other cable news networks, but with contemporary information flow in general. So often, I end up knowing what just ain’t so.
* * *
In 2003, I was living with my three best friends—Katie, Shannon, and Hassan—in an apartment on the northwest side of Chicago. We’d survived those early postcollege years where life—for me at least—felt overwhelming and intensely unstable. Until I moved in with Shannon and Katie and Hassan, everything I owned could fit into my car. My life had been, to borrow a line from Milan Kundera, unbearably light. But now, things were settling down in wonderful ways. We had our first semipermanent jobs, and our first semipermanent furniture. We even had a television with cable.
But mostly, we had one another. That apartment—the walls all painted very bright colors, no sound insulation, only one bathroom, tiny bedrooms, huge common areas—was designed for us to be in it together, to be in every part of life together. And we were. We loved one another with a ferocity that unnerved outsiders. I once went on a few dates with someone who told me one night that my friend group seemed like a cult. When I told Shannon and Katie and Hassan about this, we all agreed that I needed to break off the relationship immediately.
“But that’s what we would say if we were a cult,” Katie said.
Hassan nodded, and deadpanned, “Oh, shit, guys. We’re a cult.”
I know I am romanticizing this past—we also had huge fights, we had our hearts broken, we got too drunk and fought over who would get to puke into the one toilet, etc.—but it was the first extended period of my adult life when I felt okay