It's 24-hour News, Not the Internet

We are told rather incessantly that the internet caused are current age of disinformation/misinformation. I don’t really agree with that for a number of reasons.

There has always been disinformation and misinformation. What the internet facilitates is the extraordinary rapid spread of information, correct or otherwise. So yes, the internet makes it far easier for misinformation to spread and far easier for people to deliberately spread disinformation. I don’t think anyone would deny this.

But I am a strong believer that people are people throughout history. What changes is the context, not people so much. And a huge part of our current context involves the rapid evolution and spread of information technology, which is unprecedented in human history.

Everyone believes something about the world that is totally wrong. But some people believe a lot more wrong things than others. Moreover, most people are not interested in fixing their views. (Actually, all people are not interested in fixing all of their incorrect views. But some people are better at changing their minds about some of their incorrect views.)

It was very likely inevitable that those people, the ones who believe more wrong things about the world than right things, once they got online, would not only continue to believe lots of wrong things and they would find other people who believe similarly wrong things.

This is a version Leszek Kolakowski’s “Law of Infinite Cornucopia”: “for any given doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it.” It’s also confirmation bias: we seek out information that confirms our beliefs rather than information that contradicts our beliefs.

It was maybe only slightly less inevitable that people would go online to manipulate those people who are using the internet to reinforce their incorrect beliefs. (I think the latter is less inevitable only because there could be, you know, norms, laws or regulations about how incorrect information is treated online that are stricter than what we have now.)

People - older people in particular - like to blame the internet our lack of a shared reality. There are so many arguments about how the internet is making us dumber or more gullible or just generally ruining our lives.

I don’t agree. I certainly think companies and governments could do more to try to limit some of the crap that is online, but I don’t think the internet itself is at fault. (Social media is arguably another story as many of the platforms incentivize the distribution of incorrect information.)

Personally, I think something else happened before the internet that is much more responsible for our lack of a shared reality in the English-speaking world in 2026 than the internet. And that is the elevation of punditry into something indistinct from “the news.”

I have become increasingly alarmed at how it seems like few people understand the difference between the professionalism of journalism, and the op-ed people, the bloviating talking heads on the “news,” and their accompanying take artists all over the internet. Not that long ago, a company hired an online take artist (formerly newspaper oped writer for a major paper) to run one of the United States’ biggest TV news networks. This is just the most recent example of people seemingly incapable of understanding the difference between journalism and having takes. (In Larry Ellison’s case, he probably wants CBS News to be about takes and not about journalism but I’m not sure how many people understand the difference.)

So let’s talk about punditry and why it is often bad, why its elevation above journalism is such a massive problem, and why I think it’s far more of the problem than a piece of technology like the internet.

Journalism Vs. Punditry as Professions

Journalism is a profession. It is, according to Wikipedia, over 500 years old, but likely older in an informal sense. “News,” of course, is as old as human beings but, prior to the emergence of journalism as a profession, “the news” was gossip and the official propaganda of your local ruler, and not information from a third party whose whole job was to provide verified information.

In The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Ted Rosentiel identify 10 elements of the profession of journalism in a liberal democracy:

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth (as opposed to a narrative constructed by participants involved in the story)

2. Journalism’s first loyalty is to citizens (as opposed to government, editors, owners, corporate entities, groups, etc)

3. The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification (i.e. fact-checking)

4. Journalism’s practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover

5. Journalism must serve as an independent monitor of power

6. Journalism must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise

7. Journalism must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant to the average citizen

8. Journalism must keep the news comprehensive yet in proportion

9. Journalism’s practitioners have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience

10. Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to the news.

Not everyone would agree with this definition of journalism (especially point 10). But I think it does a reasonably good job of capturing what I understand is the purpose of journalism in a liberal democracy.

I believe that a number of well-established news organizations in the English-speaking world routinely fail the 9 points about journalists/newsrooms, with many organizations failing to measure up to points 1, 3, 8 and 9 regularly specifically.

But I do think some variant of this definition is what many professional journalists and the news organizations they work for aspire to, at least much of the time. Something like these standards are, pardon the pun, standard for many if not most legacy news organizations.

It is obviously extremely different from punditry.

Punditry was not, until the creation of the op-ed page in newspapers and magazines, a profession. Before op-eds existed, you could argue punditry was just human habit - everyone has an opinion on everything, from the poorest to the richest. We can see this in “man on the street” interviews or in just any conversation you’ve ever had with another human being. Everyone has an opinion, seemingly about anything and everything.

The op-ed page turned this opinion-having trait of humanity into a profession for a select group of people who either knew the right people, were famous already or had toiled for years as journalists first. Eventually, though, some people just began their careers as pundits and never stopped. The reason for this new expansion of punditry to a profession accessible by anyone loud (figuratively speaking) and confident enough is the internet. But more on that in a moment.

If I think about punditry as a profession, the only points above on the Elements of Journalism list that I see overlap between the two professions are half of point 6, “Journalism must provide a forum for public criticism,” and point 7, “Journalism must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant to the average citizen.” Otherwise, to me, punditry and journalism have very different aims and very different standards of professional conduct.

I don’t think one profession is good and one profession is bad, necessarily. I think there is plenty of bad journalism out there - plenty - and there is some good punditry. I don’t watch or listen to the news any more (and haven’t for many years, possibly decades) and much of what I learn about the world comes from (curated) punditry and investigative journalism. I can’t say punditry is necessarily bad on its face, some pundits are very good much of the time.

But one area where I do think journalism has a leg up is in the depth of storytelling and inquiry, something which most pundits are incapable of simply because their jobs are as pundits, to have opinions about many things.

One area in which journalism usually outshines punditry is investigative journalism. Investigative journalism is, to me, so crucial to the functioning of a liberal democracy I cannot imagine living in one without it. It’s how we really learn about how the world works. The “news” does not tell us how the world works, it just gives us details about specific events. Good investigative journalism explains and defines our world, while often telling a very compelling story.

It is also part of the equation of speaking truth to power. Without investigative journalism, we don’t know what the truth is and so cannot speak truth to power. Regular journalism is great - it is extremely fundamental to a healthy liberal democracy - but it is also never going to give us the full picture, the full truth.

There is no equivalent in punditry as far as I’m concerned. (Now, it’s possible that a professional pundit could perform investigative journalism, though I don’t know how those pundits who claim to thoroughly investigate an issue actually do a good job of it. How many of them leave their house/office when looking into a story?)

Then there’s something like data journalism, a relatively new field where a journalist uses statistics and other tools to show what is happening in the world without hitting the pavement and interviewing people. This, when done well, also helps us understand how our extremely complicated society works.

Again, I don’t know how many pundits are equipped to properly parse Big Data. Some of them are, for sure, but plenty are not. There are far more people opining online who do not understand basic statistics, for example, than there are those who can run a basic regression analysis or whatever.

But an area I think where journalism had punditry absolutely beat for the most part, at least prior to the internet, is which masters each profession serve.

Journalism and Punditry Serve Different Interests

If you accept the definition of journalism above, journalists serve the public and they do so by attempting to discover the truth. They serve the “public good.” That’s the aspiration, anyway.

Prior to the internet, pundits served…well, it would depend, right?

Some pundits served their publisher or the owner of the outlet or the editor-in-chief or whomever called the shots at the newspaper. (This is especially true of editorials from editorial boards, which obviously served some powerful interest at the newspaper.)

Others served their own consciences, or at least appeared to. (Though pundits were usually the most revered.)

But we’ve learned far too often that many pundits that appeared to be serving their own consciences were actually often or always acting as mouthpieces for someone else, whether it be someone powerful behind the newspaper or someone in government or a rich person (either someone who ran or owned a company or somebody famous, or both).

Sure, journalists have been caught doing this too. This is access journalism, a regrettable trend in journalism wherein journalists tell a version of the story they should have told that pulls punches in order to maintain access to the rich and powerful.

But it’s a feature of punditry, really. So many established, professional pundits are, at times, used as mouthpieces for others. (This is different for many if not most internet pundits.)

And there are reasons for that, some of them good. Imagine you had to write a weekly column for decades. At some point you would run out of stuff to write about, unless you had people who told you stuff.

At any rate, journalism is supposed to serve the public good. Pundits serve who they want or can get away with serving.

Church and State

At least in newspapers in liberal democracies there used to be a clear division between journalism and punditry: most of the newspaper was for journalism, often on a wide range of subjects at the largest papers. Then there was the op-ed page at the back, which was explicitly opinion (punditry) and very clearly not the news (at least for educated readers who knew how to tell the difference).

This wasn’t quite as clearly defined a line as I think we remember it being. In the sports section and in the arts sections, opinion often snuck in. I grew up reading the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun and both papers had opinion pieces in their sports sections. I can’t speak for the Sun’s culture sections (because I didn’t read them because they obviously sucked), but the Star’s culture sections had opinion pieces too. I mean, what are film and music reviews if not opinion?

But still, there was an understood line between journalism/the news and opinion/punditry that was honoured by the major newspapers (and most minor ones) in a liberal democracies much of the time.

That began to change with TV. Not with television specifically, but with cable television and the invention of 24-hour news channels.

24 Hour News Media, the Vacuum and the Blurring of Church and State

TV news used to respect the difference between journalism and punditry and, as far as I know, many network stations still do. The 6 o’clock or 11 o’clock news (or whatever time you watched it at) was full of actual journalism, though not very in depth journalism. For example, the CBC used to have a special time reserved for a very brief TV op-ed from Rex Murphy at the end, but that was clearly delineated from the main broadcast in an obvious way. The main broadcast was strictly news with no opinion unless there was a special panel about some major issue. (Again, I have to assume many stations still do this, but I haven’t watched TV news in so long, I have no idea.)

Over time, some TV networks developed investigative journalism programs that got their own time slots, that were also distinct from the main news broadcasts. (The Fifth Estate, here in Canada, for example.) And there were interview shows and with major figures and some panel shows that were also separate. There were clear lines.

And then, with the invention of cable television, which had different regulatory rules in the United States, some idiot (Ted Turner) decided it would be great to have a 24-hour news network. This despite “the news” taking up relatively little of a traditional TV network’s programming day.

What happened is that CNN, the original 24-hour news network, and later its competitors, discovered there wasn’t actually enough relevant news in the day. Sure, there was likely enough news across the entire world, but not enough that would drive interest and ratings, and help gain advertiser revenue.

So the networks did two things:

The first thing they did was focus on the things they thought would bring in the most viewers. You might have wondered why I don’t watch TV news but I can remember at least a few of the things that brought about my breakup with 24-hour news at least.

• In June of 2004, Ronald Reagan died. This was a big deal for Americans, for sure. But it was just one (very famous) person who died. Yes, he happened to be a popular former President, but he was just one person. He died on a Saturday. His funeral began on the 9th, a Wednesday. Between the Saturday and the Wednesday, CNN had nearly wall-to-wall coverage on Reagan’s death. But he was dead, of course. There was nothing new to report. So instead they just stuffed the figurative airways with non-news about Ronald Reagan, people sharing memories and opinions, almost all day.

• Two other incidents happened around the same time. In my memory, they both happened that summer, but they could have been the summer before or the summer after:

  • The first was a stabbing in Seattle. CNN covered it like it was a major national news story because there was nothing else (they believed) of interest that day. But it was a non-fatal stabbing in the 18th most populous city in the country.

  • The second was a water heater explosion in Greater Los Angeles. This was covered as a potential terrorist attack and it made me utterly insane. (It’s been 20 years and I’m still mad about it!)

This is kind of besides the point. It’s clear the quality of 24-hours news can be suspect a lot of the time for the simple reason they need to fill so much more time than network news programs and they don’t believe they have enough relevant news. (And they are unwilling to do more investigative journalism or include more positive news or more news from outside of the constituency they cover).

It’s not like newspapers and network TV didn’t cover frivolous stuff too, for far too long. It’s just that the way that the 24-hour news networks covered this stuff that was different - so much more coverage than a paper or a network news program could manage, completely out of proportion to the story’s importance.

But the other major change that occurred, that I believe it more responsible for our information environment today, is that the 24-hour news channels started putting pundit shows on their schedules.

It made sense from the network’s perspective. The cable news networks needed more people talking on TV filling time than the (deemed relevant) news could support.

But, far more importantly, it was cheaper. A pundit opining on TV still requires writers and producers and directors and the whole crew but what it doesn’t require is journalists. It doesn’t require paying a team of people to spend hours or days or weeks to track down sources and verify information. That stuff costs a lot of money. Punditry does not require require the effort of journalism and so does not cost as much money.

(Now, the 24-news networks arguably stole this approach from talk radio. And it’s possible that talk radio is really the supervillain here. But I’ve never listened to anything but sports talk radio and I do not know enough of the history of talk radio to properly assign blame.)

These cable news networks eventually started presenting the pundit shows as not especially distinct from their regular news programs. As a result, the average viewer no longer knew the difference and the networks were happy about that, they encouraged it. The host (main pundit) was now just another anchor. And they would have guests on, as if everyone was performing journalism. However, the host was not a journalist and the guests very often were not either. So many of the guests would just be what we would call “talking heads,” just more people with opinions. Sometimes these people would be representing particular powerful interests (they could be politicians, PR people, lobbyists, CEOs) and sometimes they would be regular individuals who were the subject of some recent news. And sometimes, often, they were just other pundits from the network. Occasionally an actual journalist might join further adding to the veneer of “news” for what was essentially an extended op-ed (albeit one with more than one "author”).

Some of these 24-hour news networks, perhaps most of them (I don’t watch them), slowly evolved so that there was more punditry than news. Infamously, this led to one major American cable network becoming the propaganda wing for the Republican party. As a result, a competitor tried to become the propaganda wing for the Democratic Party.

I’m sure this was not Ted Turner’s intent, but the result is that there are all these 24-hour news channels (in English but in other languages too) that often or even mostly do not perform journalism.

And I believe the result of that is that your average cable news viewer doesn’t know what journalism is. They think journalism is people on TV with opinions who occasionally “go live” to a reporter somewhere. But most of the time, it’s just takes upon takes upon takes. It’s reactions to the news that was briefly presented on one of the cable network’s actual news programs.

The internet has exacerbated all of this, no doubt. There are all sorts of YouTube channels (and channels on other platforms) where people opine and call it news. And there are certainly some pundits who write rather than use video or audio who also at least sometimes or partially pretend they are giving their readers the news.

But the internet didn’t cause this complete distortion of what “the news” means. 24-hour news did. It predates the average person’s access to the internet and found its way into way more households for a long time before the average person had a decent internet. The 24-hour news networks were blurring the truth and spending way too much time on irrelevant or insignificant stories well before the internet and social media.

Different Consequences for Pundits vs. Journalists

Importantly and significantly, these takes from the 24-hour news channel take artists did not have to be right, they just needed to get attention. How many professional TV (or newspaper) professional opinion-havers have lost their jobs for being wrong?

There are, of course, incidents where someone on some show said something particularly beyond the pale and they got suspended of fired. But, mostly, these people say whatever they want. They are wrong all the time and are never held to account.

How do I know that they are wrong without watching them? Well, nobody is right about everything. Some of these people are on TV for hours a day, 5 days a week, spewing words, making claims about the future or about contemporary individuals or companies. Much of this is not legally actionable and so they just do it and do it and do it.

And there is never a reckoning. Pundits do not get fired for being wrong about current or future (or even past) events. It’s accepted that it’s just their opinion (man) and they are entitled to it. But, especially on TV and online, it’s often presented as journalism, which is the problem.

Actual news outlets (including the real journalists who work for the actual news programs for the cable news networks), on the other hand, have to get their facts straight. If they don’t, they have to issue a retraction. Now, maybe nobody knows about the retraction when it is issued, but at least there is a perceived obligation to get it right.

One of the aspects of this great conflation between punditry and journalism is that, fairly rarely, pundits will issue retractions as well (usually when threatened by lawsuits), thereby once again confusing the public as to what the news is.

But mostly, pundits say whatever they want and get away with it. They are held to way lower standards than journalists. And millions of people think they’re reporting the news.

The Internet Didn’t Cause This But It Did Make It Worse

The internet famously democratized punditry and, to some extent, journalism. In the earlier days of the World Wide Web, you just needed to be reasonably tech-savvy to get your opinions out there. Initially nobody would see them but eventually search engines got good enough that enough people would see enough of them that we actually had to coin a word for this, the blogosphere.

The internet, and the blogosphere, produced literally millions of pundits on every subject imaginable. What it didn’t produce in equal measure is journalism, because journalism requires a lot more time and effort (and money) than writing does.

But it was social media that truly made this problem worse. Blogosphere crackpots mostly got ignored. Crackpots on social media often get more attention than normal opinion-havers.

There are also people who have performed journalism strictly through social media, by virtue of (initially) being in the right place at the right time. (The 2010 G20 here in Canada is often seen as a big moment for Twitter because of how both actual journalists and regular people were using it to report on what was happening downtown.)

However, as so many have noted, what determines success on social media is attention and attention only. Truth has nothing to do with it. So it further encourages people to cultivate having an opinion (usually trying to present it as informed). Sometimes people are experts in their field, sometimes they’re physically close to where the news is occurring, and often they’re just some person. Because everyone has opinions about everything. So often these opinions are not special and they certainly aren’t news.

To make the problem worse, TV and radio news outlets began reporting social media posts as news, essentially treating these as the laziest and easiest version of “man on the street” segments, ever. And this has only exacerbated the blurring of the lines between the news and opinion.

But I don’t blame the internet for this. I blame social media companies a bit but I mostly blame TV news networks, specifically the cable news networks that pretend that they are 24-hour news when they are often just hours of punditry.

We in North America live in the world they created: a world where the reaction to a piece of news is as important or is perhaps more important than the news itself. A world in which investigative journalism is regularly de-prioritized so that some person, who is on TV or in the paper for some reason most of us don’t even know, can spout off. And if that person is wrong, they will not lose their job. Some of them will become more successful for being consistently wrong, they may get their own show.

What Can We Do?

This blurring between journalism and punditry is so utterly entrenched that I really don’t know how it can be fixed. Even if/when the 24-news networks die, the horse is out of the barn. The democratization of journalism and punditry means it’s up to us to figure out which is which, unfortunately.

Sop, first of all, stop watching 24-news! Just stop it. Today! If you must watch TV news - and I really don’t know why you feel like you have to watch the news - watch your local network news on your local TV station. (That might be a problem if you are American, as a lot of those stations can no longer be trusted, which is a related story I’m not getting into.)

(While we’re at it, if you use social media for news, you should think long and hard about who owns your preferred social media network and what their priorities are. Twitter, for example, is owned by the world’s richest man and allows its AI to create child pornography. Probably not a great place to get your information.)

Identify outlets doing investigative journalism and give them your money instead of the cable companies. It doesn’t matter how they do it - TV, newspapers, written work online, videos online, podcasts. What matters is the quality. How do you know what the quality is? One easy way is the length: if the stories are long, it’s quite likely they’re good, though that’s not a guarantee (especially with video and audio). The number of sources included is a great indicator. I’d also recommend outlets that have an antagonistic relationship to the government (though that needs to be regardless of the party in power) and/or major corporations.

Identify pundits who help you understand the world, especially those who sometimes make you mad. Give them money. If you can afford it, try to pay pundits from a number of different perspectives on different topics. I do not subscribe to anyone who is obviously on “The Right” (though I have at times in the past) because, for me, whatever “The Right” appears to be mostly against liberal democracy, something I cannot abide. But I subscribe to multiple pundits who make me angry sometimes. Sometimes they say things I don’t want to hear or vehemently disagree with. That’s important. If you only follow people you agree with, you will never change your mind. And changing your mind is important. (I’d also note that it’s good to switch up your pundits. Maybe once or twice a year try someone new and drop an old one.)

Importantly, don’t take anything at face value that doesn’t pass your smell test. If something seems incredible it likely is. It feels to me like a whole lot people in the media are not particularly interested in telling the unvarnished truth. They’re interested in maintaining relationships with powerful people so lots of them are involved the laundering of the bad opinions and actions of the powerful or just being absolutely credulous of these people. If some outlet reports what a politician or CEO says verbatim with no alternative perspective, ignore it. And if multiple outlets are reporting a story that is just outrageous - whether because it seems impossible or because it fills you with outrage - wait a bit for more information to come out or go find another source.

Lastly, I think it’s very important to talk to each other. There are a lot of people out there who believe all kinds of crazy things in part because they’re not getting enough help from media. As we’ve seen, some of these people vote. And some of them will apparently vote for politicians who would like to end liberal democracy. If you know anyone who, say, supports what is happening in the US right now. Or really if you just know someone who convinced they live in a dangerous, scary place with rampant crime and other problems even though they live in, like, suburban Canada. It’s important to talk to them. Not to argue with them necessarily, but to guide them towards better sources of information.