These days, there’s usually crisp, blue light in the background as the news anchors talk. You don’t know whether it’s morning or night, and it doesn’t matter, because the news beats on. It’s always live—which feels, and maybe is, close to being alive.
Of course, it’s hard to argue that CNN has brought the world together in brotherhood and kindness. There’s something nauseating about Ted Turner’s capitalist idealism, the notion that we can change the world for the better and make billions 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 even some of the time, and so you’ll forgive me if I recall it with such fondness.
That August, I turned twenty-six, and we threw a dinner party called “John Green Has Outlived John Keats,” and everybody who attended read some poetry. Someone read Edna St. Vincent Millay:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
A few days later, the owners of the building told us they were selling it. But even if they hadn’t, the apartment would’ve split up eventually. The big forces of human life—marriage, careers, immigration policy—were pulling us in different directions. But our candle gave a lovely light.
* * *
We were living in that apartment during the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Hassan grew up in Kuwait, and he had family members living in Iraq at the time. For a few weeks after the invasion, he didn’t hear from them. He would eventually learn they were okay, but it was a scary time, and one of the ways he coped was by watching cable news almost all the time. And because we only had one TV, and we were constantly together, that meant the rest of us watched a lot of cable news as well.
Even though the war was covered twenty-four hours a day, very little background information ever entered the picture. The news talked a fair amount about the relationship between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq, for instance, but never paused to explain the theological differences between Shias and Sunnis, or the history of Iraq, or the political ideology of the Baathist movement. There was so much news—news that was forever breaking—that there was never time for context.
One evening, just after the U.S.-led forces entered Baghdad, we were all watching the news on the couch together. Unedited footage was being broadcast from the city, and we watched as a cameraman panned across a home with a huge hole in one of its walls that was mostly covered by a piece of plywood. There was Arabic graffiti scrawled in black spray paint on the plywood, and the reporter on the news was talking about the anger in the street, and the hatred. Hassan started to laugh.
I asked him what was so funny, and he said, “The graffiti.”
And I said, “What’s funny about it?”
Hassan answered, “It says ‘Happy birthday, sir, despite the circumstances.’”
* * *
On a minute-by-minute basis, it’s hard for any of us to consider the Happy Birthday Sir Despite the Circumstances possibility. I project my expectations and fears onto everyone and everything I encounter. I believe that what I believe to be true must be true because I believe it. I imagine lives that feel distant from mine monolithically. I oversimplify. I forget that everyone has birthdays.