Forget the former things; do not dwell on the things of old. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? (Isaiah 43:18-19)
From these words of scripture, one might think the prophet Isaiah speaks with resignation, as if weary of life and convinced he has “seen it all.” But he means the opposite: much remains unseen. His “new thing” may be original, innovative, imaginative, unprecedented, or a first occurrence. It may also be prophetic warning against complacency in the face of new dangers.
Its meaning depends on whether this thing is genuinely new. Is it a sudden emergence previously hidden from view, or the outcome of events that together form a pattern?
Who decides whether an event deserves public attention? Why does a small protest of, say, 20 people receive wall-to-wall coverage while a rally of 20,000 may be overlooked? Some would argue that freedom of the press gives media owners and gatekeepers wide discretion to choose stories that fit a narrative and shape public opinion. To shape public opinion is to shape people’s perception of reality. News may reflect reality, but it can also construct an alternative storyline through selective editing and staged scenes, providing talking points for a preferred version of events. This is what one philosopher calls the politics of meaning. [1]
[1] See The Politics of Meaning, by Michael Lerner. In his view, meaning encompasses culture, values, and their symbolic expressions, and serves as an antidote to cynicism and discontent. He argues that meaning is not found in political parties or organized social action, but in voluntary engagement and in supporting families—not isolated individuals—in need. We need one another to heal divisions and restore hope to fractured communities. At the political level, citizens use interpretive frameworks shaped by experience to recognize the narratives being sold to them, as well as the ritual episodes staged to form a collective identity grounded in a priori cultural values.
Meaning is an inner judgment shaped by perception. It often relies on a dialectical contrast, but thought is not confined to simple categories such as good and bad. That is a false dichotomy. We find meaning in both favorable and unfavorable conditions, and in the interaction of multiple patterns within a physical and moral universe where good and bad coexist. Yet instead of exposing audiences to a broad range of perspectives, mainstream media often presents a bland uniformity, repeating narratives within frames of reference its viewers already accept.
CONCENTRATION IN TRUSTS
When the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, Americans received news from many sources representing many viewpoints. This freedom of the press grew organically in a young nation stretching from the mountains of New Hampshire to the sandy plains of Georgia. Local issues and regional concerns supplied the material for countless printing presses scattered across the country. During the nineteenth century, the United States grew from 7 million people in 1800 to 76 million in 1900, and from a narrow strip of thirteen coastal states and territories to a continental power reaching the Pacific. It eventually became an empire stretching from Alaska across the Pacific to the Philippines. Over the same period, news reporting changed from a decentralized network of local presses into the modern structure of mass media, exemplified by the Hearst newspaper chain that helped build the American empire. [2]
[2] Newspaper chains gave news a corporate structure. By buying papers across the country, owners built organizations that resembled trusts. This concentration narrowed the range of viewpoints, replacing local color with clipped photos and staged events. A well-known example comes from 1898, when Western artist Frederic Remington was in Havana on assignment for the Hearst chain to report on revolutionary activity. He wired William Randolph Hearst Sr. at the New York Journal: “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war.” Hearst reportedly replied, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
This is how “breaking news” is made. Mr. Hearst was not simply reporting events; he was creating them—or, more precisely, manufacturing news from rumor and predetermined aims. Frederic Remington’s pictures served only as raw material for the story. The process was straightforward: newsmen selected a fact or fragment of information, then built a narrative around it until invention appeared credible. Hearst’s method of creating news from almost nothing was deliberate, and, as discussed below, highly profitable.
First, journalism is a business, not a public service. Second, news—even under the revered banner of the “Free Press”—is not a service but a commodity, manufactured to sell what attracts attention: advertising, “daily doses of meaning” in advice columns and horoscopes, local interest, and then spun stories about children, conflict, controversy, and crime. Third, journalism operates within a web of interlocking corporate entities that tends to homogenize viewpoints. Ideas outside that consensus are often treated as “unfit to print.” Media culture—its shared sense of what counts as news—can become self-reinforcing and closed, trapping itself in groupthink. In that bubble, outlets miss important stories because information circulates within the same narrow loop. It is like a long flight in which passengers and crew breathe recirculated air without fresh oxygen. Without fresh air, no heat is generated to spark new ideas; heat turns to cold. In such conditions, taking a new or contrary position means breaking with consensus and resisting entropy—the loss of energy, passion, and life. By contrast, change and variety prevent stagnation and may open the way to what Christians call Kairos: the unexpected convergence of visions.
Inside the “bubble,” editors, publishers, broadcast executives, and reporters [3] ‘transform’ data and facts into digestible “wafers.” These wafers, i.e., bits and pieces of ‘information,’ resemble the Roman Catholic rite of transubstantiation. Its performative power lies in the act of consecrating boring facts and data into a glowing, transcendent, suspense-filled narrative.
[3] Before journalism became a profession, reporters were often seen as drudges in smoke-filled rooms, recording the details of actual events. By contrast, in scholarly life the term journal referred to periodicals that published research findings in systematic form. The rise of journals, along with peer review, was a major development in modern science. Each issue carried observations and conclusions of shared interest, passing knowledge from one researcher to another. Scientific papers never claimed to be complete in themselves; each was understood as one small piece of a larger puzzle. The steady accumulation of many modest contributions has been one of the great strengths of Western science since the seventeenth century, giving it a collective power far beyond that of any single individual.
SAMENESS AND CONSOLIDATION
As news organizations expanded, the quality and variety of news did not necessarily improve. Contemporaries of William Hearst observed growing uniformity in both story selection and viewpoint. Society was certainly changing rapidly, yet critics of the press, including Theodore Roosevelt, condemned its fixation on the police blotter. Muckrakers dug through the social underworld for stories of sadism, exploitation, and violence—subjects that even some reformers thought were overemphasized. Whatever one thinks of muckraking, this style of reporting tended to portray society as a Hobbesian struggle in which neighbors fought one another for their share of the social pie. Such stories became so common they were almost predictable as front-page news. This drift toward “blotter journalism” is what I mean by the sameness of news.
One reason news often feels repetitive is not simply bias or poor reporting. Corporate journalism naturally tends to standardize viewpoints. As this business model took hold around the turn of the twentieth century, advocacy journalism gave way to a more centralized press. News shifted from the varied output of many local presses to a narrower set of viewpoints shaped into what was presented as public opinion. As reporters increasingly called themselves journalists, the industry itself consolidated into a small number of major media conglomerates. This was, after all, an age of empire, marked by corporate trusts such as Standard Oil and by imperial powers seizing and exploiting overseas territories.
FROM CONSOLIDATION TO THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT
In an era of consolidation, who decides what is worthy to be selected as the news of the day, and by what criteria serve as the measuring rod of newsworthiness?
There are still unwritten standards that limit public debate to approved topics. This is often described as governing from the center: avoiding positions seen as either far left or far right and building consensus around policies that allow gradual change. According to the concept known as the Overton Window of Political Possibility [Overton Window], politicians are constrained by the range of policies widely accepted at a given time. Ideas outside that window risk voter backlash. But when an idea once dismissed as extreme gradually or suddenly enters mainstream discussion, the Overton Window shifts, and views previously excluded from public discourse can become politically feasible.
A century ago, a similar phenomenon appeared in the public square. Although it would be an anachronism to use the term Overton Window to a century old phenomenon, it facilitates our understanding of how evanescent societal phenomena (often nothing more than crazes or fads) are covered, and which events are selected as “the news of the day” in the operations of print and electronic journalistic enterprises.
The news business is less about discovering previously unrecognized phenomena than about deciding what to present as news through the press. In practice, editors, publishers, and media organizations determine what counts as newsworthy. What makes something newsworthy? Several formal and informal criteria have been developed:
- News concerns developments on a scale that seems unimaginable.
- News reports first-occurrence events—what is genuinely new under the sun.
- News does more than report facts. It selects and interprets relevant details without becoming commentary or editorializing.
- News adds new information about a recent event or changes in its circumstances.
- News traces patterns in society by analyzing observable data.
- News may be accurate, but only provisionally so; it is not truth itself.
News is often called the first draft of history. What counts as news depends on context: it may be a passing curiosity or the latest episode in a long historical story. At the most fleeting end are styles, crazes, and fads—brief phenomena that flash and disappear. Some trends last longer, such as fashions that remain in vogue for a season or two. At the other end are enduring historical narratives: continuing stories marked by conflict, plots, and counterplots. Reporters and historians still trace such sagas in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948, the struggle between labor and capital since at least the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and the long contest between Islam and “the West” since the Hijra in 622 CE. These larger narratives turn on recurring themes of struggle, despair, hope, renewal, and national purpose. History thus appears as a cycle of construction and destruction, yet also as an affirmation of l’chaim [4]—the resilient will to remain fully alive despite catastrophe.
[4] The Hebrew word for life, chaim, is plural—not in the sense of a multitude, but of a pair or double. In this interpretation, chaim points to our “two lives”: God’s plan for life on earth and the life to come.
The twentieth century can be seen as an age of reform associated with the Progressive movement. As that movement gained momentum, the news business often shifted from reporting events to promoting viewpoints and interests, especially through the rise of advertising and public relations. These fields increasingly displaced straightforward reporting by “manufacturing consent” around a narrow range of issues, packaged through nearly indistinguishable candidates and the invention of dubious public threats. Such distractions, amplified to stir public emotion, turned attention away from matters of real importance and toward sensational but inessential topics such as crazes and celebrities, impoverishing public life.
NEWS IN THE PROGRESSIVE AGE
The Progressive era of the twentieth century produced not only settlement houses and urban-planning institutions, but also two world wars that killed millions through imperial rivalry, pandemic, and revolutions that brought fascism and communism to power. It also gave rise to psychoanalysis, the “lonely crowd,” and anti-aesthetic movements in the arts such as Dadaism and atonal music. As this new nihilism spread, commentators increasingly remarked on the emptiness of the news. NBC commentator David Brinkley, for example, captured that emptiness in several aphorisms about the nature of news:
“The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.”
“People have the illusion that all over the world, all the time, all kinds of fantastic things are happening. When in fact, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening.”
David Brinkley’s reflections on news concern not only what is reported, but also how much of it is trivial or inessential. Television news maintains a constant presence even when there are no major breaking stories. Its function is less to report significant events than to shape public perception and hold viewers’ attention.
ECONOMIC MAN INFORMING THE NEWS
David Brinkley’s wry observations suggest more than they first appear to. News organizations often operated on the assumption that society is fundamentally shaped by homo economicus— “economic man”—a view of human nature that treats people as driven chiefly by self-interest and calculating utility, always “looking out for number one.” This idea of man as primarily an economic actor became a guiding assumption in how news organizations understood human behavior.
To support this view, one might appeal to Karl Marx, who argued that human beings are shaped by what he called society’s superstructure: its institutions and cultural values. In Marx’s account, this superstructure arises from the economic base—the relations of production, or the social and economic arrangements through which people produce and distribute material goods.
His idea of the superstructure overlooks the primary bonds of social life—those for which people will sacrifice, suffer, and die. No one gives his life for a mere opinion, which always carries some degree of doubt. Nor does he sacrifice himself for a cold rational calculation. He does so for realities he takes to be true, and for those realities he is willing to suffer.
The economy is not a separate realm governed by its own laws apart from the rest of life. It is simply the sphere in which people meet, under limited circumstances, to exchange goods and services. Human life is lived socially, not economically. Our social nature includes many unquantifiable realities—such as cooperation, love, and worship—that give meaning to participation in social institutions. These realities have intrinsic value, unlike the instrumental reasoning associated with economic man.
The emphasis on trade over production did not shrink the state so much as it helped destroy America’s industrial base, hollowing out the manufacturing heartland. As news organizations grew increasingly fixated on economic growth measured by stock prices and leveraged assets, sovereign economies abandoned protection and embraced a new world order built on free trade—which, as we shall see, is anything but free.
FREE TRADE
Free trade, in this view, degrades a national economy by financializing it and elevating banks to the chief arbiters of policy, while pushing building, production, mining, and manufacturing to the margins. Because it does not restrict imports, it favors consumption over production. Under free trade arrangements, the trader becomes master and the producer subordinate. After Europe’s experience with Napoleonic dirigisme, free trade emerged as the dominant “liberal” approach to managing national economies, but that model collapsed during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Economists often defend free trade because it boosts growth—at least on paper—rather than stability. Yet the dislocation it creates can devastate entire regions as workers are displaced by cheaper, often lower-quality imports.
Defenders of free trade usually cite comparative advantage, lower prices, and greater consumption. But economists’ support for free trade remains only one side of the argument. To counter predatory trade practices by other nations or by international rules, import duties and tariffs can play a legitimate role. When used carefully, tariffs favor producers over consumers, strengthen a broad middle class, and raise corporate income and payrolls. Free trade, by contrast, tends to reward financial speculators while hollowing out entire economies. Rather than wealth “trickling down,” the gains often flow upward to the top one percent.
THE COLLAPSE OF TRUST IN FREE TRADE
Far from being free, free trade proved costly for the makers and producers of goods, the real source of a nation’s wealth. A nation weakens itself when it abandons manufacturing and neglects the development of its own resources, especially capital goods industries, natural resources, and skilled labor in production, transportation, and distribution. As a result, the workforce has become increasingly deskilled, with many workers pushed into low-wage retail jobs that favor consumption over production. At the same time, converting artisan, craft, and machinist work into coding and clerical compliance roles burdens the economy with labor devoted to administrative rules rather than productive activity.
News organizations and lawmakers largely overlooked the harm linked to free trade. Agreement after agreement benefited a small coastal elite while weakening the productive base of much of the country. After the Soviet Union collapsed, many in the 1990s hailed this combination of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy as the “end of history.” Instead, the new millennium brought a different reality—financial instability and violent conflict involving stateless actors and rival civilizations—which I will address in my next post.