"But by showing us live coverage of every bad thing happening everywhere in the world, cable news makes life seem like it's just an endless string of disasters - when, for most people in most places today, life is fairly good"
About this Quote
Easterbrook is skewering a modern hallucination: the sense that the world is perpetually on fire because the screen is perpetually on. The line works because it identifies a quiet bait-and-switch in the cable-news business model. “Live coverage” sounds like civic virtue, a promise of immediacy and accountability. In practice, it functions as a mood filter. If the camera is always pointed at catastrophe, the viewer’s brain starts treating catastrophe as the baseline.
The subtext is less “turn off the TV” than “beware the incentives.” Disasters are telegenic, compressible into urgent visuals and simple narratives. “Fairly good” is slow, statistical, and unglamorous: falling poverty rates, longer lifespans, fewer wars. Those stories don’t deliver the same adrenaline spike or keep you from changing the channel. Easterbrook is arguing that news is not just reporting reality but shaping a felt reality, one optimized for attention rather than proportionality.
Context matters: Easterbrook’s broader project has often been to puncture fashionable pessimism with data-driven optimism, pushing back against the idea that modernity is a continuous decline. Here, he’s not denying suffering; he’s challenging the viewer’s intuitive math. A terrible event can be both real and rare. Cable news collapses distance, making “everywhere” feel like “here,” and “sometimes” feel like “always.” The result is a politics of permanent emergency: anxious citizens, reactive leaders, and a public conversation that treats dread as wisdom.
The subtext is less “turn off the TV” than “beware the incentives.” Disasters are telegenic, compressible into urgent visuals and simple narratives. “Fairly good” is slow, statistical, and unglamorous: falling poverty rates, longer lifespans, fewer wars. Those stories don’t deliver the same adrenaline spike or keep you from changing the channel. Easterbrook is arguing that news is not just reporting reality but shaping a felt reality, one optimized for attention rather than proportionality.
Context matters: Easterbrook’s broader project has often been to puncture fashionable pessimism with data-driven optimism, pushing back against the idea that modernity is a continuous decline. Here, he’s not denying suffering; he’s challenging the viewer’s intuitive math. A terrible event can be both real and rare. Cable news collapses distance, making “everywhere” feel like “here,” and “sometimes” feel like “always.” The result is a politics of permanent emergency: anxious citizens, reactive leaders, and a public conversation that treats dread as wisdom.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Gregg
Add to List
