SILLYVISATION
Presenters David Walker and Lois Hart on CNN, 1980
The term “silly season” was coined to identify the annual appearance of frivolous or light-hearted stories in newspapers that appeared regularly around July and August. From rude vegetables spotted in village fairs to tales of heroic dogs saving boys from rivers, these stories shared a summery, laid-back, feel-good vibe and inconsequential nature, and remain synonymous with the golden age of print.
These stories never really revealed an abundance of blushing cheeks or spikes in dog heroism at a particular time of the year; they were rather the marker of journalists, politicians and other consequential folks’ annual summer holidays. It’s safe to assume that grave matters continued to happen in July and August, just as they did throughout the rest of the year, it’s just that there were no politicians around to generate hot air or hacks on duty to convert it into news. Newspaper columns and magazine pages, just like nature, abhor a vacuum – obliged to fill their pages, they would send cub journalists off to agricultural shows and get them out patrolling riverbanks.
Things took an even sillier turn with the advent of rolling-news TV pioneered by Ted Turner and CNN, which promised non-stop news to keep audiences glued to TV screens 24/7. Ted’s pitch was to have a station that you would switch over to at any time to check what was happening. If you are asking why he didn’t check Twitter or TikTok, you are showing your age. In the absence of armies of unpaid content creators and their charming cats, where was all this news going to come from? At the time, the media reception to the launch of rolling news was derisive. Network journalists and newspapermen whose entire professional lives had been about the production of news simply could not fathom where all that extra supply of news was going to originate.
Ted Turner’s strategy was to pad out the news content with a magazine-like vibe that supplemented traditionally reported news with comment and analysis topped up with telegenic presenters and a veneer of showbiz. This was in part facilitated by the prevalence – and much lower pricing of – satellite link-up for transmitting TV signals that allowed CNN to roll out globally. One key idea was to make the newsreaders engaging and as watchable as the news they covered. Superficially this wasn’t an original idea – at the time all the major networks employed superstar anchors: typically middle-aged men with a decent golf handicap, veteran journalists on first name terms with CEOs and presidents, sporting long-healed war wounds from their time on the frontline, leathery tans and well-coiffed hairpieces.
Their sense of authority laid their claim to an audience’s trust and attention. A long roll call of these venerable gentlemen (there were only a few ladies), following the path laid by Walter Cronkite, used their gravitas (“weight” in Latin) to literally anchor their station and network, just as an anchor fixes a ship to the bottom of the sea.
By contrast the first key hires at CNN were anything but heavy: a newly-wed husband-and-wife team, Dave Walker and Lois Hart. CNN would cultivate entertainment value instead of heaviness of news, using the soft-focus story of an attractive young couple from the backwater of Sacramento going to work together every day. An unfolding and unscripted soap opera element was to be served with the news. That’s infotainment folks!
Although in retrospect CNN looks like an instant success story, the truth is that its first ten years were precarious. On one hand the company struggled to be taken seriously as a producer of proper journalism and on the other it was hard to explain to advertisers why the channel was really needed. Regular networks all had extensive and varied news programmes already, and plenty more besides.
Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein came to the aid of Ted Turner by invading Kuwait. As Evelyn Waugh had already noted in his 1938 novel Scoop, wars are a superfood for the news machine. In fact, most media historians agree that without the Gulf War, CNN – and with it the very concept of rolling news networks – might have been filed away among other bad ideas once tried in America.
CNN’s story is in part the story of how entertainment and information fused together as the vital ingredients of what we consider news today.
We know well today that the much more refined science of attention harvesting has measurable and therefore marketable ingredients. CNN’s innovation was showing that some news had a high degree of entertainment value, which could be successfully monetised. A story’s entertainment value was partly based on the narrator’s own story. It’s not just a question of what happens and to whom it’s happening, but who is telling you about it, that marks the event. It’s fun to think that today there is a little bit of David and Lois in the DNA of every TikTok post.
These days, it’s silly season all year round. The result is that access to reliable information, in our so-called “age of information”, is more contested than ever, and what’s more, clogged up by the detritus of often very entertaining distraction, one of the ideas successfully sent up by the film Don’t Look Up (2021), about the annihilation of humanity. Turns out that being functionally ignorant isn’t really blissful at all.
One current journalistic trope is the idea of the “adults in the room”. Take this headline from the New Statesman recently: “The adults in the room: While Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings lost control of coronavirus in March, a handful of officials saved Britain from a far worse economic fate.” Put the term into a search engine and you can find thousands of other stories with the same gist. The term is a shorthand form of criticising the ideas or the behaviour of radical outsiders or rogue politicians like Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson. It implies a common consensus about an easily understood concept or problem, and a radical interpretation of the same by an outsider of low intelligence, maturity or learning (or possibly all three) who suggests an outlandish solution running contrary to the common consensus. It’s a form of self-congratulation used mostly by those who consider their position to be beyond question.
The term seems to have found common usage after it formed the title of a book by the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, subtitled “My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment” (2017), later the subject of a film of the same name (2019) directed by Costa-Gavras. It covers Varoufakis’s period in office while Greece’s newly-elected popular government tried in vain to persuade other EU finance ministers to restructure its national debt in ways that would be less harsh on its people. In this context, the “adults in the room” was used as an insult to exclude Varoufakis from the conversation and eventually the administration and politics altogether. The put-down identified him as an irresponsible interloper, unqualified to participate in the debate.
The topsy-turvy of our recent past is diagnosed by many self-identifying “adults” as having been caused by nothing but the misguided and uneducated or the immature youth, or the malign intent of foreign enemies in Russia or China who subvert democratic processes and empower populist politicians. How else other than by accident would advanced democracies elect such unqualified buffoons to great and responsible offices of state?
This trend, which was incidentally started by a professional entertainer, Silvio Berlusconi, in Italy before finally infecting the whole world, is seen as the cause of so much trouble and strife. If for one second the adults would pause to consider themselves the cause and the rise of populism the effect, how different might the picture look?
When, in 1997, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the newly-elected Labour government, handed to the Bank of England the decision to set the interest rates and essentially control of setting the government’s budget, the decision must have both surprised and delighted its then boss Eddie George. The Guardian, allegedly still then a newspaper of the British left-liberal grown-ups, celebrated the 25th anniversary of that fateful decision a couple of weeks ago, calling it “Independence Day”. The Guardian still reasons that it was the grown-up thing to have done.
As Ha-Joon Chang told me (page 178), managerial politicians like Mr Brown, who handed crucial decisions over to the financial sector, bought a ringside ticket to decades of repeated crashes, in which those responsible were rewarded with new cars to crash, such was their blind faith in the adults’ world vision. Could these events not be more likely to have led to a total loss of faith in politics? When all that is on offer is repeated versions of the same failed policies can we blame the electorate for amusing itself by electing the guy with the craziest things to say or most hilarious hair, just as they elected to switch over to the most entertaining newsreader because there seemed to be nothing new in news? What else would you do with politicians if they don’t really run things? At least let them be entertaining. The fact that a hostile press was never able to undermine Trump could partly be because people saw the fight between him and his critics in the establishment as just a game of Punch and Judy, rather than a contest of ideas.
Here in the UK, having thrown out a manifestly incompetent, corrupt and buffoonish prime minister the adults in the room are talking amongst themselves, trying to decide who will rule us next. This is less an election and more a coronation by Conservative party members, a self-selecting minority of extreme-adults (71% male, average age 57), to deliver another shuffle of the same deck. A generation ago people used to complain that politicians were patronising and talked down to the electorate as if they were children. Viewing the debates between the candidates vying to be our next leader has been like watching children talking to dogs. From the point of view of the dog. Masoud Golsorkhi