Over the last three decades, an incredible inversion has occurred in American society: Those who were once revered as experts are now dismissed as ignorant schills, who are trying to deceive, coerce and manipulate the public.
Take the medical profession as an example. In order to become a physician, one has to receive their bachelor’s degree (4 years), score well enough on the MCAT to attend medical school (4 years) and complete a residency (3-7 years depending on specialization). In other words, the total amount of knowledge required to be a competent doctor is 11-15 years of education. That is a huge investment of time and intellectual resources to master a very complex subject.
I’ve spoken to several doctors who tell me that, over the last 5 years, they have encountered numerous situations where their patients will become combative if the diagnosis differs from what the patient unearthed through a Google search on WebMD.
Mind you, 99% of these patients have no medical background. They have no formal training in bioscience, but they have convinced themselves that the diagnosis of the symptoms they typed into the internet are reflective of their particular condition. They dismiss the physician’s diagnosis as lacking validity even though the doctor has invested their entire lives into learning knowledge to execute this job.
Physicians aren’t the only ones experiencing this issue. It seems like every profession is experiencing an onslaught of skepticism. How did we get here? When did the public switch from recognizing expertise to believing that experts possess no knowledge of any kind? Well, like everything in our world, the answer is complex. Therefore, I want to tell you a story that will help bring this issue into focus.
Old School Journalism
Prior to the 1980s, there were three main news sources: print media (newspapers and magazines), radio and television network news (NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, etc.). All of these companies hired reporters and journalists who had received their education in journalism. Not only were they steeped in the proper way to research and source their stories, but they were also taught a code of ethics.
An important aspect of that code is when you are reporting on a subject, you should always take the time to verify the facts in your story with experts. For example, let’s say you’re doing a story about a guy in modern day Bethlehem who claims to have unearthed the barn in which Jesus was born. Before you report on this story, you would speak with several experts.
First, you would call an archaeologist to ask about the dating of the barn. From there, you would speak to an expert on carbon dating to backup the archaeologist’s claims. Then you would tap a New Testament scholar and ask if the dating of the barn coincides with what we know about the dates and reality of Jesus’ birth. Finally, you would look into the background of the person making the claim: Who are they? What’s their profession? Do they have any ulterior motives?
Of course, performing this kind of research takes time. Prior to the 1980s, a journalist or reporter was given time to make these inquiries and stitch these pieces together. It might take days, weeks or months, but your publisher/producer valued accuracy above all else. This felt manageable because people digested news in predictable cycles. Particularly if you’re producing a television news show, you only need to fill two one-hour slots of content per day (morning and night).
The Rise of 24-Hour Television News
When CNN (Cable News Network) debuted in 1980, it was banking on an entirely different model of news consumption. Rather than discuss the news for an hour in the morning or an hour in the evening, they would talk about the news 24 hours a day. A novel concept, Ted Turner believed that there was a market for people who, given the choice, would prefer to watch news for entertainment during the day.
An amazing idea with one major problem: How were they going to produce enough video content to fill a 24-hour news cycle? Even if they had 10,000 reporters working full-time, hunting down leads, filming, editing and producing original content, there would still not be enough stories to fill the time.
The initial solution was that CNN would report on headlines from across the globe. By simply hoovering up news coming from other sources and reframing it in their own words, they didn’t have to produce original content. If they wanted more depth on a story, they would invite experts on air and if a big story required on-the-ground reporting, they could dispatch a reporter.
The second innovation was producing shows with hosts who could fill an hour before they would return to the headlines. These shows proved to be extremely popular: Moneyline with Lou Dobbs, Evans & Novak, Crossfire with Tom Braden and Pat Buchanan and Larry King Live. Not only were the hosts interviewing guests, but often they were interspersing their opinions into the show, which was unusual for news broadcasts. Larry King became a master of inserting his opinions into interviews with guests, which is what enabled him to eventually become the highest rated news show on television.
The real genius of CNN became clear when the Challenger Space Shuttle blew apart during its launch in 1986. Whereas many networks could only utilize their news teams for brief intermissions into their regularly scheduled programming, CNN could focus directly on the disaster and never cut away.
They were investigating the story as it unfolded in real time, which meant they were reporting a lot of speculation, some of which panned out to be true, while other elements were proven false. Because CNN cared about accuracy, they would correct their mistakes. This became CNN’s playbook going forward: Report what you know and correct as you go. Of course, if you, the viewer, missed the correction, you might be walking around with bad information, but this is the price you pay for 24-hour news coverage.
CNN would repeat this formula again and again, until two huge factors changed CNN’s fortunes:
In 1980, when CNN launched, only 20% of American households had cable television. By 1990, that percentage had increased to 58%.
When United States entered into the first Iraq War in 1990, the camera and satellite technology had advanced to such a degree that Americans could literally watch the war unfold in real time from their living rooms.
CNN beat every other network news outlet because they were consistently streaming footage from the war. In fact, their coverage was so successful, Nielsen Ratings suggested a significant shift: Viewers were now foregoing traditional programming in favor of watching CNN. The 24-hour news cycle had been integrated into the American lifestyle.
The CNN Effect
Networks took note of CNN’s success and decided to copy the CNN formula. In 1996, both FOX and NBC launched their 24-hour news channels on cable. While MSNBC mirrored CNN by adopting neutrality in their reporting, FOX decided they would lean into reporting towards a partisan lens by adopting a conservative posture to extract market share from CNN.
Not only was this strategy successful, but, in retrospect, it was perhaps one of the most influential factors in shifting our society away from expertise-based journalism into opinion-based journalism. Similar to CNN, FOX and MSNBC would intersperse shows with their headline news coverage. However, because FOX was geared towards conservativism, Bill O'Reilly became an icon on the right.
By 2001, O'Reilly had nabbed the top news slot from Larry King and, by the mid-2000s, O'Reilly's celebrity eclipsed that of almost every pundit invited on his show. Indeed, rather than tune in to watch his interviews, most viewers were tuning in for O'Reilly's lengthy monologues on current issues of the moment. This tactic, which was borrowed from conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, became the cornerstone of his brand attracting as many as 3.1 million viewers per evening. Even though O'Reilly was stating his opinion, many viewers took his words as fact and adopted his perspective as their own.
MSNBC, in an effort to compete with O'Reilly, hired Rachel Maddow in 2008 and fully embraced its role as the liberal counterpart to FOX’s conservative coverage. Similar to O'Reilly, Maddow would engage in long monologues on the current issues of the moment, and similar to O'Reilly's viewers, many listened to Maddow’s opinions as facts, integrating them into their perspective.
How Opinions Became Facts
If you were alive in the 1990s, you might remember how the proliferation of the internet was slow at first and then quickly ramped up. In 1995, only 14% of the U.S. population had internet access, which was generally restricted to computers with dialup modems. By 2000, that number had increased to 51% and, by 2010, high speed internet was ubiquitous resulting in 71% of the population having an internet connection. The smartphone revolution in the early 2010s filled in the gap for those who lacked computers. This meant that all people (not just tech savvy individuals) now had infinite information at their fingertips.
The best analogy for understanding the internet would be a library. Even a modest library often has tens of thousands of books. Large public libraries will house hundreds of thousands or even millions of books. How did those books get into the library? Librarians who are trained in how to work with source material determine what books are worthy of sitting on shelves and what books should be ignored.
The internet is like walking into a library with billions of books, but the books are not just from publishers. Literally anyone who has a website (like me!) can publish information, and the curator is not a trained librarian who knows good from bad sources. The curator is an algorithm that determines the best sources by how much traffic a website receives and how much money is being paid for a result to appear at the top of a search.
Therefore, when you search Google for an answer to your question, your query is not necessarily the correct or best answer, but the most popular answer, which may be right or wrong. Moreover, there are endless sources. The ability to sift through this information can feel daunting and overwhelming to many who lack the educational or technical background to flush out fact from fiction. As a result, many people turn to media figures they trust who can synthesize this endless information into easily digestible soundbites.
From 2006 until 2022, the total revenue of these news channels increased year over year with MSNBC posting $1B in 2020, CNN posting $2B in 2020 and FOX News posting $3.2B in 2022. The news business was booming with the most profitable aspect of each network not being the news itself, but rather the shows built around personalities who provided their opinions about current events. Many of these figures earned tens of millions of dollar year and much of the advertising revenue was geared towards their shows.
The CNN philosophy of “report what you know and correct as you go” had initially been adopted by these other networks as well. However, as these personalities grew in stature, there was a noticeable shift in how the news was being reported. A reporter in the field would provide information back to the studio and then, immediately, one of these personalities would provide their opinion, interpreting the facts for the viewers. It didn’t matter how accurate the reporting was or how knowledgeable the expert being interviewed, what mattered was the news personality had the last word. The hierarchy of truth was being inverted in the minds of viewers—opinion about facts matters more than the facts themselves.
Follow the Breadcrumbs
If you’re following the breadcrumbs, you can see how this was a perfect storm for the demise of expertise. As internet access became ubiquitous, the population was inundated with information. Many people lacked the cognitive tools to dissect fact from fiction. These people turned to trusted personalities to make sense of the information, personalities whose popularity was not rooted in fact-based reporting, but spreading their opinions about current events.
Because they were trusted, the opinions of these personalities became the opinions of the viewers. This negative feedback loop was reinforced as the search algorithms became more sophisticated. The algorithms began curating “facts” based on your preferences. If you are conservative and you Google “the best candidate for president”, you’re going to receive very different results than someone who is liberal. One cannot understate the profound effect this reality had on the population at large.
When every piece of information is curated to your specific preferences and that information is derived primarily from opinions of facts rather than facts themselves, then you come to believe that your opinions are inherently accurate. This is why we find ourselves in a society where a person who has dedicated their lives to a profession can so easily be dismissed. The average person has come to believe that their opinion is as factual as the knowledge of an expert. The two are equivalent in their minds.
Of course, this perspective makes life a lot easier. If you believe that the earth was created in six days, your opinion is just as valid as all the scientific data that tells us the earth is 4.5 billion years old. You are the ultimate arbiter of fact versus fiction. No longer is fact versus fiction determined by consensus opinion or experts who have spent decades in their profession studying a particular subject or by journalists who verified dozens of different sources to make sure their reporting was accurate. Nope. Your version of reality dictates truth and falsehood.
We are all at the center of our own universes now and the scary reality is that we’re about to find out what happens when all those universes collide.
Great read. Just one addition for this topic though.
While Bill O'Reilly absolutely dominated Fox News in the early 2000s, I don't think you gave enough attention to Rush Limbaugh. He had his own TV show from 1992 to 1996, in addition to his nationally syndicated radio show, which at its heights reached over 600 radio stations nationwide. While his TV show never reached the level of success his radio show did, his cultural impact far exceeded anything that O'Reilly ever achieved.
In 1994, during Bill Clinton's attempt to pass Health Care legislation (and Limbaugh's relentless criticism of it, which Clinton didn't feel was honest, true or fair), he called into a radio show and said that “After I get off the radio…
Great article. I see this every day. Short of getting into a discussion which has the potential to become an argument, is there anything I can say or do about it.? This 'willful ignorance' is a much bigger problem for all of us in the future.