Is There Still Something Called ‘News?’

I hate to say it, but it’s really gotten to the point that what used to be a clear division in the media between news on the one hand and opinion on the other has disappeared.

In the olden days, when I was a kid (when Eisenhower was President) newspapers like The (failing) New York Times had what they called the ‘editorial page’ which contained several brief statements from the paper’s Editorial Board and one or maybe two longer statements written either by employees of the paper or an independent know-it-all who otherwise earned a living by shooting his mouth off on radio or TV.

Otherwise, the rest of the newspaper contained either advertisements for the mattress sale at Macy’s or reports about an event which actually happened somewhere in or outside of the United States.

As for other sources of news, a word which, by the way, comes from the idea of some event as being ‘new,’ TV had not yet invented 24-hour cable news programs and radio news was basically a weather report and that was it.

The so-called news channels on cable now consist almost entirely of some so-called ‘experts’ sitting in a studio and pretending to be saying something new or original or both, even though for the most part they are reading scripts that roll on offscreen teleprompters; the AM radio stations play non-stop spielers…