When I was a kid, the news came on at six o’clock.
Oftentimes, we’d eat dinner on fold-up TV trays in the living room and watch Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw deliver the day’s events in that serious, authoritative voice that made you believe they knew what they were talking about. The news was the news. Entertainment was whatever was on next: Family Ties or Miami Vice. There was a clear line between the two, and nobody seemed confused about which was which.
Today, that line doesn’t just blur—it’s been completely erased.
I have an AppleTV, and I watch several streaming services. One that I turn to a lot is YouTube. Not YouTube TV, although we watch that quite a bit as well. I have a premium YouTube account and I like to watch a wide variety of things on the service about movies, TV shows, music, and more. I’m also a big fan of finding a YouTube video focused on rainstorms or ambient music to listen to while writing, which I use at my day job, but that’s through my MacBook, not my TV. By the way, I highly recommend North Carolina Beach Sounds.
While scrolling through my YouTube subscriptions on my AppleTV, I noticed that out of about 100 channels I follow, ten of them are news and political commentary. Ten. That seemed weird to me at first, but then I thought about it more. Of course, I watch political content. We all do. It’s become the primary form of entertainment in the 21st century, whether we admit it or not. I’ve done zero research on this, but it seems like this is the case.
The last time I looked, seven of the top ten podcasts are political commentary/interview shows. Plus, almost all of them now have a YouTube video version. I even subscribe to a couple. Some lean into the video first and then upload the audio for podcasting, but there’s just so much out there you can’t keep up. These channels post hours of content, often daily.
Here’s an unoriginal hot take: YouTube/Podcast interview shows are the new late-night talk shows. Stephen Colbert and The Late Show may have been recently cancelled, but he’s going to be just fine because he’s simply going to pivot from traditional linear TV and do a YouTube show just like Jon Stewart and Conan O’Brien.
Of course, politics has always had an entertainment element. There were Sunday morning political shows (Crossfire, The McLaughlin Group) where right-of-center and left-of-center political opponents yelled at each other for an hour, with a moderator keeping everything copacetic. None of this is particularly new, but I sense a fundamental shift.
Politics is now a hobby. People attend rallies, dressing up in their team’s colors like it’s a football game, or wearing elaborate costumes reminiscent of a comic book convention. There are now political cosplayers. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I imagine hours upon hours are spent consuming political content, which is almost exclusively commentary.
When I was a high school senior in the late 80s, none of this would have seemed remotely normal.
If you wanted the news, you read a newspaper or two or a magazine like Time or Newsweek. The local TV news station had several stories of what was happening in your community. If you wanted to know what was happening nationally, you turned on ABC World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, or NBC Nightly News. If you were an absolute news junkie, you might even watch 60 Minutes on Sunday.
What do we do now? We get sucked into TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Xwitter, BlueSky, or the granddaddy of them all, Facebook, and get fed a firehose of political takes whether we want them or not.
A few days ago, I was trying to explain the whole Jubilee debate with Mahdi Hasan and 20 Far Right Conservatives, and the insanity of the entire video to my wife. I failed miserably as she was having trouble wrapping her head around it. To be fair, it was early in the morning.
What I was trying to explain was that Jubilee is a YouTube channel that has this weird debate format. I think it came on my radar with the Pete Buttigieg versus 25 undecided voters video. The one with Mahdi Hasan jumped up because after the video went online, he went out and did the podcast/video podcast circuit, talking up his experience. One of his appearances was with someone I subscribed to. I listened to the interview and became interested in learning more.
I started watching the Hasan Jubilee debate, but I “peaced out” after just a few minutes. There’s a white guy saying he is a Native American because his ancestors were settlers, and a young man proud to be a fascist in the “debate.” It’s funny as satire on Saturday Night Live. It’s terrifying in real life.
There is little doubt that everyone should be more informed about what’s happening in this country. It is good to be engaged. Far too many disengaged people refuse to pay attention.
People who avoid thinking critically and expect others to dictate their thoughts and feelings pose a serious problem. The social media algorithm is all too ready to think for them. We should know what’s going on. We should be able to make well-informed decisions about any number of things going on, but that’s not what’s happening.
On CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, there are prime time blocks of talking heads telling viewers what to think, how to feel, and pushing an agenda. These aren’t news shows. They are entertainment shows but marketed as news.
I think it’s essential for everyone to know what’s going on. Still, I’m not crazy about marking every evening by watching your favorite news personality destroy your political opponents with facts and logic (or propaganda). It ceases to be news at that point. It’s just theater. I can’t handle more than 15 minutes of any MSNBC show because none of it is news. It’s commentary wrapped up in a news-like shell. I don’t even try to watch Fox News because all you’ll see there is biased or misleading.
It’s all just sports, and we’re rooting for “our team” to win instead of actually wanting the country to get better. Or smarter. Or understood.
The media packages every political take or story like professional wrestling. There is always a good guy and a bad guy. No matter which side of the political spectrum you are on, there will always be some outrage or scandal. Politics is not just entertainment. It’s “sports entertainment,” and that’s appealing to the average viewer because everything gets reduced to black and white. Babyface versus Heel. I’m not talking about Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention. It’s the positioning of the story.
Nobody, least of all the “news” organizations themselves, is the least bit interested in informing people. They care if you’re watching. They care about ratings.
When politics becomes sports entertainment, everything is a performance. Politicians aren’t trying to govern, they’re trying to get soundbites. Commentators aren’t trying to inform, they’re trying to get clicks. Viewers aren’t trying to understand complex issues, they want someone to tell them they’re right and the other side is wrong.
Maybe I’m being nostalgic for a time that wasn’t actually better. Maybe political entertainment is just democracy in action. Still, I wonder if this country would be better served if we separated news and entertainment. I’m sure I’d personally benefit.
At the very least, it would free up some space in my YouTube subscriptions for something else. Maybe I could finally catch up on all the racing marbles videos I’ve been meaning to watch.
Now that’s entertainment.
Be seeing you.
