(Dobbs) In The Age Of Nine Second Soundbites, There's Hardly Time To Be Shocked
We can be saddened, angry, afraid... but rarely shocked.
Once upon a time, it didn’t take much to shock us.
Today, it takes a whole lot.
Today we are hardened to the realities of life in the 21st Century. Hardened to the escalation of savage shootings, of climate calamities, of political duplicity, of internet exploitation, of racist attacks, of cold-blooded conflicts.
Even hardened to an ex-president who is so divorced from reality, he thinks he can put policy into effect “even by thinking about it.”
The definition of news, as I used to teach university-level journalism students, is something that departs from the norm. When a hundred thousand airplanes safely take off and land every day, that’s the norm. If one crashes, that’s news. When life’s modern-day realities become the norm— the shootings, the climate, the increasingly nutty ex-president, and all the rest— it’s harder to be shocked. Eventually it could even be harder to keep calling them news.
We are hardened by those realities, and by the pace of their occurrence. Once upon a time, a shocking story that could change our communities, our nation, our world, could stay in the headlines for days, sometimes weeks. People could absorb the news, assess the news, analyze the news. We had time to let the shock subside.
Not any more.
It’s almost as if there’s no time to be shocked. There’s a totally fresh headline, a totally fresh outrage, a totally fresh catastrophe, almost every day, sometimes it seems, every hour.
An analogy comes from my business, TV news. When I started more than 50 years ago, soundbites ran an average length of 43 seconds. Today the average is less than 9 seconds. We used to talk about the 24-hour news cycle. The satirical news site The Onion a few years ago talked about the 24-second news cycle. I used to cover the same story for weeks on end. Today, aside from wars and politics, it’s like there’s no need for that. Today’s news will be swiftly subsumed by tomorrow’s. Sometimes even this hour’s news will be outdated in the hour that follows. It’s all “Breaking News,” even when it’s not.
Hardly time for shock to set in.
Personally. I am saddened beyond expression each time teenagers with AR-15s slaughter schoolchildren and supermarket shoppers and revelers on the 4th of July. But in a nation that has more guns than citizens, where politicians sell their souls for campaign donations and resist sensible gun reform with the banal bromide that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” I am saddened but can I still be shocked? Mass shootings— by people with guns— still are news and always will be but at the same time, they have become the norm.
There’s little hope on the horizon. As The Associated Press put it after the Supreme Court’s June decision to expand gun rights, “It’s open season on U.S. gun laws.” Here in Colorado in late July, a judge stopped the Denver suburb of Superior from enforcing a ban, passed by its board of trustees, on the sale and possession of semi-automatics. Now, even a local government cannot say, “No more AR-15s in this town.” No, I cannot still be shocked.
And I am angry behind expression— beyond polite expression anyway— by politics.
It has become so common, and so widespread, for ambitious right wing candidates to parrot the lies of Donald Trump. As we saw with the preposterous hyperbole that followed the FBI’s legal search of Trump’s Florida home, some seem to even try to out-Trump Trump. But they do it without remorse, and tens of millions of ordinary Americans buy their dangerous drivel and cheer them on. I am angered, but not shocked.
It has become chillingly common and widespread, especially after Trump’s loyal legions began denying the verifiably legitimate 2020 election, for officials in Republican-led states to blatantly reverse more than fifty years of gains in voting rights for minorities in America, which makes it harder for those minorities to vote, not easier. But those Trumpians so persistently propagate their perfidy about election fraud— which in some cases also masks racist motives— that countless ordinary Americans have come to believe it and stand behind them. I am angered by their dangerous gullibility and their disregard for democracy, but after almost two years of it, no longer shocked.
It not longer shocks me when elected officials on the far right overtly embrace anti-semites and white nationalists. The latest confirmation of how they cater to this crowd: last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, in Dallas. A headliner was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a man who flaunts his fascism and makes a point of calling himself a “Christian politician” and who has declared that his citizens “do not want to become peoples of mixed race.” Admirably, when one of his longtime advisors heard his comments, she resigned from her position, calling them “a pure Nazi speech worthy of Goebbels.”
But here’s what should be most shocking of all: delegates to the conservative conference cheered him on. One was quoted on Politico: “All in all, I loved him.”
Of course Donald Trump got in on the act too, sending out a news release with a picture of him and Orban at the Trump golf course in New Jersey, with the message, “Great spending time with my friend.”
Birds of a feather. I should still be shocked, but I’m not.
I am past the point of being shocked by the duplicity of justices on the United States Supreme Court. It has become almost commonplace during the confirmation process that nominees will flat-out lie about their respect for constitutional precedent, like a woman’s right to an abortion. Then once they win their seats on the bench, they contradict their own promises and in the case of abortion, they overturn long-standing precedent despite its foundational import in the history of High Court conduct. I am angered, but not shocked.
It has become more an expectation than a shock that the highest ranking Republican member of Congress, Mitch McConnell, who has led his party in the Senate for 15 years, will periodically proclaim that he intends to block virtually everything coming from a Democratic president, whether it be Barack Obama or Joe Biden. Not just everything he thinks is bad, but everything. Yet he has done this for so long, I am no longer shocked.
And he has help at the state level. The New York Times reports that nearly two dozen Republican state treasurers will bar companies from government contracts if their policies focus too much on the environment, which is a Democratic priority, at the expense of the fossil fuel industry, which is a priority for Republicans.
This is despite deadly droughts, fires and floods, demonstrably worsened by man’s emissions into the environment. It’s despite bathtub rings as waters drop at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s two largest reservoirs. It’s despite record storms, even last month in Death Valley of all places, flooded by three-quarters of the rainfall they usually get there in a year.
With admirable exceptions but far too few, Republicans in elective office are in lockstep with their leadership, although out of step with the American people. Guns and abortion are the two most current examples. But they’ve been that way for so long now, I am hardly shocked.
Even overseas, we all are inured to shock.
China ignores international conventions and fires missiles into the waters around its nemesis, Taiwan. Not because anyone declared war, but because a leading politician from the United States paid a visit to the island during an Asia tour. A strategic miscalculation or a simple mistake could have started a shooting war. But by now, in the midst of Russia’s unprovoked and merciless war in Ukraine, we are used to autocrats spurning rules that have long kept most of the world safe. We just had one running our own country for four years. So maybe we’re scared, but not shocked.
It has gotten so bad, I might not even be shocked if, despite a solid string of achievements under their belts, the Democrats still take a drubbing in the midterm elections, a month and a half from now. I shall be mystified, but not shocked.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
With respect, Greg, the Roe v. Wade decision was not a constitutional precedent, it was a legal/court precedent. The overturning of Roe v. Wade corrected an error by the Court in regard to the Constitution and States Rights as set forth therein. That 'right' should have never been 'given' in the manner in which it was. The Constitution pretty clearly defines what rules, rights, and issues belong to the States to decide. Granted, the overturning is difficult - repugnant even, but it set the course for the States to decide; as should have been done in 1973. There are dozens of Constitutional scholars who hold that view and who defend it as a matter of Constitutional law. I empathize with all who have to deal with this issue yet again. However, I hope that once the mass hysteria dies down, that our Citizens, our States, and our Nation can deal with this critically important issue reasonably and responsibly. This is an issue of law, not emotion.
Good piece Greg. Your conclusion says more about we the people than the perpetrators.