“We won’t be signing off until the world ends,” Ted Turner said in 1980, just before the launch of his latest media venture. “We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event.”

Turner died on May 6 at 87. The world hasn’t ended yet, nor has his project, Cable News Network, but the latter changed the former in a big way.

If you’re too young to remember the pre-CNN era, trying to describe it feels like pulling a fish out of water and showing it a non-aquatic landscape:

On television, “the news” was generally broadcast twice a day, morning and evening, in half-hour local and half-hour national/world shows. Morning network shows included short news segments between entertainment content. Truly earth-shaking events might call for “SPECIAL BULLETIN” interruptions.

Radio stations often carried very short “top of the hour” news updates between their other programming, but prior to CNN Radio (launched at the same time as CNN’s cable television news channel) there were no “24-hour news” stations.

About half of the American population cared enough about “the news” to subscribe to a daily newspaper, delivered to their front porches each morning or evening. Such newspapers — apart from a few big-city publications — tended to be very local in focus, with perhaps a smattering of national stories from wire services like Associated Press and United Press International. USA Today, the first really intentionally “national” newspaper, launched two years after CNN.

At the time of CNN’s launch, about one in five US households subscribed to cable television. Three years later, that number had doubled and eventually approached 90% (streaming options have dragged it down, but the percentage remains higher than in pre-CNN days).

Since CNN’s launch, “the news” has gone from short daily feeds covering pre-deadline events to 24/7/365 real-time coverage of far more things, in far more detail, by numerous and varied outlets.

In theory, that should make the public much better informed than we used to be. We can know more OF what’s happened, and know more ABOUT what’s happened.

In reality, I’m not sure our attention to important facts about important events has really increased.

The 24-hour news environment seems far richer in sensationalism, pearl-clutching, and outrage bait than in useful information about the important stuff.

Former football star leads police on low-speed chase in a Bronco.

One movie star’s divorcing another movie star and it’s getting ugly.

Someone said a bad word on a hot mic.

That’s not Ted Turner’s fault. It’s our fault. CNN and its media children and grandchildren give us what we want to watch, because that’s how businesses make money.

That they’ll keep showing us whatever keeps us watching isn’t news.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In the months leading up to the USA’s 250th birthday party, some debris from its 200th is making headlines.

The New York Times‘s Jennifer Schuessler finds conspicuously “much less investment and enthusiasm overall” for this year’s semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than the 1976 bicentennial, itself diminished by jaded jeers charging that “‘Buy-centennial’ huckersterism had sold out the true radical spirit of ’76” (“How a Historian Saved the Schlock of ’76,” May 5).

Schuessler chronicles plenty of “hats, mugs, playing cards and pickleball paddles” currently being hawked under the aegis of Donald Trump, but compared to such bicentennial-branded excrescences of “unapologetic 1976-style schlock” as toilet paper, diapers and condoms, even the output of a coauthor of Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life can be described on the pages of the Gray Lady as “tasteful.”

Yale University’s library includes a permanent panorama of such effluent ephemera thanks to State University of New York academic Jesse Lemisch, who preserved what he predicted would become “a deeply embarrassing heritage for 2076.”  Schuessler explains how Lemisch drew a stark contrast between the actually existing capitalism of ’76 and “the ‘arrogant nationalism and elitism’ of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.”

Lemisch confronted “the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power” as early as a 1967 analysis of the American Revolution, “a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.”  That viewpoint was “particularly recommended” in the newsletter The Libertarian, whose “Washington Editor,” Karl Hess, was on the path that led to his interview in the July 1976 issue of Playboy (which highlighted his observation that “The Declaration of Independence is so lucid we’re afraid of it today … because it tells us there comes a time when we must stop taking orders”).

Yet even back then, Lemisch suspected that efforts at “replacing elite history with a history of ‘average people'” had, in shifting emphasis from the halls of power to the market square, “merely traded in the heroes of politics for the heroes of business.” So it was not completely out of character for him to see the spirit of 1976 as one that “floated down from above, and responded to no popular longing to celebrate the Bicentennial,” despite Schuessler noting that voting with dollars for “Patriotic Dixie cups and cereal boxes might seem to epitomize the kind of populist ‘history from below’ that Lemisch championed” (less than a month after Mekado Murphy has written in the Times that relics of Rocky‘s bicentennial bout “are as essential to Philadelphia tourism as the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall”).

One replica of the Declaration from the Me Decade, a freebie for Fourth of July grocery shopper Michael Hart, might have made the perfect bit of decorative detritus for Lemisch — if Hart hadn’t instead typed up the text, immortalizing it as the first entry of his Project Gutenberg collection (he would oversee it growing into an online library tens of thousands strong).  In 1971, one of the few files starting to spread as widely on nascent computer networks was a popular Star Trek game by Mike Mayfield.

The utopian universe whose tricky traders rarely “wear red, white and blue, or look anything like Uncle Sam” (as surmised in the 1987 episode “The Last Outpost”) ironically also provided inspiration to the patriotic Objectivist Hart. Times obituary author William Grimes described Hart’s eBook giveaways as aiming to prefigure a Trek-like “age of universal abundance,” one which would upend “all established power structures” and  “challenge the entire social and economic system of the United States.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Citing anonymous sources, the New York Times reported on May 4, US president Donald Trump is considering an executive order that would require pre-release  “national security vetting” of all new Artificial Intelligence models.

The following day, the US Department of Commerce revealed that three three large AI firms — Microsoft, Google, and xAI —  have already agreed to submit their models for “pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research.”

For obvious reasons, those developments trigger my strong aversion to regulation of anything, at any time, and at any level of government. I can indulge a little — very little — bit of sympathy for the position Trump’s in though:

Individual state governments have been rolling out AI regulation proposals for some time, and that’s just not According to Hoyle.

AI, at least if connected to the Internet, is clearly an interstate and/or international commercial activity, and the US Constitution clearly and unambiguously assigns the power to regulate such activity to the federal government. Specifically to Congress, but in the absence of congressional action, I can see why Trump would want to preempt the illegal state-level schemes with something of his own.

I just wish that something of his own was “none, period.” Here’s why:

“Whatever can happen,” Augustes De Morgan wrote in 1866, “will happen if we make trials enough.”

To which I must add, if “we” don’t make trials enough, someone else will.

AI will inevitably be pushed to whatever, if any, limit it has.

If American researchers can’t legally do it, Chinese researchers will do it.

If Chinese researchers can’t legally do it, Swiss researchers will do it.

If every government on the planet imposes pesky regulations on doing it, people who don’t care about pesky government regulations will do it.

It can happen. Therefore it will happen.

I don’t wear rose-colored glasses … or at least, in poor metaphor mix, I consider those glasses half-full. We can plausibly expect both good and bad things out of AI developed to its limits.

Those  of us who are allowed to avail ourselves of the most advanced AI possible will disproportionately reap whatever rewards it produces.

Those of us for whom maximal AI is forbidden fruit will be more vulnerable to AI’s dark sides.

Since I like rewards and loathe punishments, I prefer to belong to the former group. So should you.

King Canute understood that he could not effectually command the tide. Our rulers should heed the lesson.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY