How USA Today Destroyed the World

How USA Today Destroyed the World

USA Today came on the scene with “McNews” – graphic images, color codes, and news chunks. Instead of the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, the public, in particular the traveling public, is treated to all the news you can possibly digest in about 30 seconds, identified by primary colors.

CNN (and others over time) came up with news bites, short videos and continual images that must be refreshed and renewed constantly to make up for the boredom usually associated with a 24 hour news channel. Part of the result is the airing – nationally – of ANYTHING that could shock ANYONE and the basic sensationalization of even basic (or uninteresting) news items.

CNN again (and MSNBC and FOX and…): a crawl is added to the bottom of the screen image, further reducing news and information to roughly a 40 character summarization that skips most, if not all, the color from any issue.

Mobile communications via SMS – or “texting” as it is known – is the final nail in the coffin of the erudite. Given a 160-character limit, the visible user interface of a tiny screen on a mobile phone or PDA and the typing challenge of either a phone keypad of extremely miniaturized QWERTY keyboard, texting has reduced conversation to little more than a stream of consonants that barely resemble proper speech, let alone spelling and grammar. While “c u l8r” may be expedient from a mobile perspective, it doesn’t convey emotion, conviction, style or any other characteristic one might like to have when conversing.

Is it any wonder that elections and other important events or happenstances that require some amount of thought are won or lost today largely due to minute, fleeting phrases or gestures that happen to be captured by the ever abundant microphones, cameras, etc. that are out there? Why are we surprised when John Kerry, who has the unfortunate disease of being too intellectual and therefore subject to using compound sentences, makes a small faux pas telling a joke and is vilified for the errant phrase without a clear understanding of the original intent? And that his arch nemesis, the President, who subsists on and is marketed almost entirely with sound bites, zeroes in immediately on the small set of words and transforms Kerry into the Devil, and many Americans actually are willing to buy into this?

Every year, our country is spending less time thinking through facts and issues and more time simply reacting. It’s why elections aren’t being won not so much on character, but by characters.