The Destruction of Hillary Clinton by Susan Bordo

Author:Susan Bordo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

But it’s also true that the reporters’ notion of what their “job” is has changed, gradually but inexorably, since the 1950s and 1960s when the anchors—like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite—were recruits from print journalism. Men like Cronkite, who believed in reportage that “required careful examination through text,” were skeptical about the informational value of such a visually oriented format as television; if you compared a man who spent a year reading the newspaper with one who watched TV news, Cronkite once commented, “the guy who had been watching television would come out with a damn strange idea of what happened in the world.”

But by the late sixties, producers like Don Hewitt, who introduced 60 Minutes, were experimenting with “packaging reality as well as Hollywood packages fiction.” People, Hewitt believed, “were interested in seeing Morley, Dan, and Mike pursue a story, just as they like to see Kojak.” The line between informing and entertaining was becoming blurrier. At the same time, the advent of CNN and its other twenty-four-hour-news-cycle spawn created the need both to fill time and hold viewers captive, resulting in too-swift reporting and endless sensationalizing repetition of the latest “breaking news”—giving uncertain reports the illusion of “truthiness.”

“The inevitable result,” as television historian Steven Stark remarks in Glued to the Set, “was a thinner line between fact and rumor.”

All these factors were in play during both the 2008 and 2012 elections. But with the 2016 election, it seems, several new developments made the line between fact and rumor, truth and “story,” even thinner—and profoundly strengthened the resilience of the “Untrustworthy Hillary” fiction.

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