We hear the phrase “24 hour news cycle” an awful lot, but in reality we don’t have a 24 hour news cycle. Instead this decade has seen a 24 hour news cycle evolve into a 24 hour opinion cycle.
Take the case of my previous post of Mary Matalin claiming that Bush inherited 9/11 and reduced unemployment his first year in office. Both statements are completely false. When Bush took office unemployment was at 4.2% and had raised to 5.7% after his first year in office. Now a lot of people can defend this in part because of 9/11 and they would be right, but the fact is that Mary Matalin flat out lied and no one in the news world tried to correct her.
Welcome to the 24 hour opinion cycle.
What we are seeing now is more people able to take to their airwaves and spread their opinion, completely unchallenged and void of fact. This is evident on FOX, CNN and MSNBC. Even Keith Olbermann is more of an opinion show than news show.
People talk about how our nation has become so polarized over the past decade. We now see everything is right and left, or blue and red. This is a direct by-product of the 24 hour opinion cycle. Take Matalin’s comments yesterday. In our busy lives a lot of people don’t have the time to fact check people like Matalin. Instead they quickly catch a little talking point and it becomes fact to them. I am sure someone today will sit around the water cooler and say “you know that Bush reduced high unemployment he got from Clinton in his first year. I heard that on CNN yesterday.” Of course they are just echoing the very same lie, but they don’t know any better.
I know we all like hearing opinions that make us feel good, but when these opinions start getting confused with fact, as the news networks try to make it appear, then our nation becomes a little less intelligent and a lot more polarized. It isn’t helping anyone and I really hope we can fix this in the next decade. Bring back the 24 hour news cycle and change it to a 8 hour opinion cycle at the most, with every opinion going through higher scrutiny so they aren’t passed as fact.