The End of News
On formless information, fading authority, and a future without shared reality
When I turn on the local or national news in the evening, it feels like stepping into a fast-moving river—already in motion, already past the point where I could have entered cleanly. There’s no beginning or end, no resolution. In fact, our local affiliate begins every broadcast with the “BREAKING NEWS!” crawler on the lower third. Every night. When everything is breaking news, nothing is breaking news.
Now, stories burst onto the screen with what are portrayed as devastating global consequences, only to completely disappear a week later. “Unprecedented” is used as a synonym for “surprising” or “shocking.” And that’s not accurate. I’m rarely surprised by what the media calls “unprecedented.”
Broadcast news makes me crinkle my nose like an unpleasant odor I can’t quite place. Like that odor, the stories feel formless because they don’t have a clear beginning, a resolution, or any obvious place to step out of them.
The “nightly news” was a ritual in our house when I was growing up—not because it was especially good, but because it was how most of us learned what was happening beyond our immediate world. I’m not romanticizing it or putting a nostalgic glow on TV journalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Typically, once a day we’d get a glimpse into what was happening beyond our community or neighborhood. While we can debate the perspective, we can also agree that we were at least aware of the issues.
Morning and evening newspaper editions supplemented the six-o’clock news for those who wanted more depth, with the understanding that it wasn’t “breaking” news. The stories in the daily editions might have been days, if not weeks old. On the weekends, we mostly disengaged entirely.
That being said, all news back then was highly curated with narrow perspectives. Gatekeepers controlled what we saw, when we saw it, and often how we felt about it. As the range of stories expanded and long-marginalized perspectives were centered, the news became more representative but less cohesive. What we gained in correction, we lost in shared cultural continuity.
News back then was about scale. It fit inside the human nervous system. News was limited, imperfect, but rarely overwhelming.
But then something shifted. Not all at once, and not with much drama, but in a way that changed what news was for. Networks realized they had a captive audience. Institutional credibility eroded as marketers learned how to take advantage of this new attention economy. Not only did the commercials between segments become more targeted, but so did the curation of the news stories. And when that happened, journalism shifted from authority to entertainment.
What was once expertise became opinion. It was now more important to “break” the news than apply nuanced context to what was being reported. Once stoic news anchors began to shed tears, their reaction to the stories replaced their interpretation of them.
There’s no media mogul, on-air personality, or ideological side to blame. In a quiet spiral of adaptation, news institutions learned to entertain us because we responded more reliably to performance than to interpretation.
After acts of mass violence or political assassination, the rush to explain usually outpaces the available facts. Context collapses under the pressure to interpret quickly, and early narratives harden long before clarity arrives. What follows is often an explanation that is incomplete, provisional, or misaligned—yet capable of spreading far beyond the borders of its origin.
If I look into the future mirror to see where this is headed, it doesn’t feel very far away. What we call “news” becomes a curated stream based on what those constituents want to believe. Individuals follow these mostly social media streams of news based on their temperament, identity, and tolerance for views from the opposing side. Strangely, that makes the future of news calming. It’s functional, efficient, and quietly effective—for the people who have opted into that flavor.
And if we look deep into the future mirror, we might see our current selves looking back at us: a present where truth isn’t argued, it’s selected. We feel hyperinformed about “what happened,” even as everyone carries a different version of what happened with equal certainty.
When figures like Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw spoke to the nation—for better or worse—they helped establish a shared frame of reference. Democratic systems depended on the ability to argue over those facts rather than argue about whether they existed at all.
What happens when individuals begin deciding the facts for themselves? How do we relate to one another when we no longer share the same version of what’s real?