Those invisible signals provided our kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms with access to jazz clubs, baseball stadiums, and symphony halls. For a century, they have been transporting us instantly to London, Cairo, or Tokyo, or back in time to the Old West or deep into the imagined future of interplanetary travel.

The reception of those radio, then television, signals didn’t just inform us, they shaped us. Everyone experienced broadcasting individually and collectively, both intimately and as members of dispersed crowds.

Radio and television fostered an ephemeral and invisible public arena that expanded our understanding of the world — and ourselves. Whether it was the final episodes of radio serials like “Gangbusters”, or television’s “M*A*S*H” or “Seinfeld,” Americans often marked the passage of time by shared broadcast experiences.

Even today, more Americans use standard AM/FM radio broadcasting than TikTok. At a time when most Americans get their news from local TV stations and broadcast television networks, and radio remains pervasive, it might seem frivolous to express concern about preserving technologies so deeply embedded in daily life.

Yet a media evolution is occurring, as paid subscription video streaming and audio services climb in popularity, and fewer Americans are consistently tuning in to broadcast media.

Demise of shared moments

The broadcasting era is becoming eclipsed by new media technologies. In the era of TV and radio dominance, “mass media” was defined by shared experiences.

But now, new media technologies — cable TV, the web, and social media — are changing that definition, segmenting what was once a huge, undifferentiated mass audience. All those new media fragmented what were once huge collectives. Bottom line: We’re not all watching or hearing the same thing anymore.

With fewer Americans simultaneously sharing media experiences, the ramifications of this evolution stretch beyond the media industries and into our culture, politics, and society.

The shared moments that electrified and unified the nation — from President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats to TV news coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and up through the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — have become more rare. Even national events, such as a presidential election, are different today in that our collective experiences now seem more individualized and less communal. People get their news about presidential elections from sources with radically different perspectives on what used to be shared facts.

The very idea of collectively tuning in to history as it happens has been altered, as the profusion of channels and platforms now funnels audience members into self-segregated affinity groups where messages are shaped more for confirmation than enlightenment.

How to remember

As we move into this new media world, broadcasting risks being relegated to the rustic past like other old media such as the rotary telephone, the nickelodeon, the 78-rpm phonograph, and the DVD.

That’s why, from April 27–30, 2023, the Library of Congress is hosting a conference, titled “A Century of Broadcasting,” that invites scholars, preservationists, archivists, museum educators and curators, fans and the public to discuss the most effective ways to preserve broadcasting’s history.

The goal of the conference, convened by the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force, is to begin envisioning the future of this technology’s past. As a radio historian and member of the Radio Preservation Task Force, I was invited to serve on the conference organizing team. Panels, papers, and presentations will look at how broadcasting is currently being archived, and how we, as a society, can think more systematically and formally about how we’ll remember broadcasting. While the task force is primarily concerned with broadcasting’s inception as radio, aspects of television’s past will be included as well.

Preserving radio — and TV — is not as simple as storing machines or tapes. To understand broadcasting history, preservationists must try to describe an experience. It isn’t enough to show somebody the printed script from a 1934 Jack Benny radio program, or the theatrical stage set used when “All in the Family” was taped before a live studio audience in 1973. To comprehend what Jack Benny, Gracie Allen or Jackie Gleason meant to the people of the United States involves trying to imagine, and almost feel, an experience.

“Essential” first step

The Radio Preservation Task Force seeks to go beyond the big corporate commercial collections that already exist. NBC’s radio and TV archives, as well as the Radio Corporation of America’s and others, are already well-preserved and housed at repositories like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.

The Radio Preservation Task Force is concerned with the diverse universe of broadcasting, including the many types of stations and networks that defined American broadcasting.

“Millions of Americans listened to college, community, and educational radio stations that were less famous than CBS and NBC but still played an important role in daily life,” notes University of Colorado scholar Josh Shepperd, chair of the Radio Preservation Task Force. “Preservation projects associated with the Radio Preservation Task Force have revealed to us that African American radio stations played an important role in helping catalyze the Civil Rights Movement by fostering and inspiring community.”

Shepperd added that “those are just two examples of often-overlooked but essential components of our nation’s broadcast history.”

At the Century of Broadcasting conference, scholars will examine such varied topics as how gender roles were performed on the air and how Spanish-language radio maintained listener identity with the community while broadening outreach. The conference also includes discussion of international and global radio communities, with scholars presenting on broadcasting history from France, Germany, and Latin America.

“There’s even a panel on preserving the history of unlicensed and illegal ‘pirate’ radio,” says Shepperd.

Our media remains so atmospheric — it’s everywhere, all the time — that we too rarely pause to concentrate on how it evolves and how those transformations ultimately influence us.

Radio and TV might not technically be “endangered” right now; after all, we all still use telephones even if they look completely different and serve functions largely unimaginable 40 years ago.

Yet moving beyond the broadcast era holds important ramifications for all of us, even if we cannot precisely discern them in this moment. Recognizing the need to preserve radio and TV’s past marks an essential first step, so that the future will be properly informed about how we lived and communicated for over a century of American history.

Attacking journalism — even accurate and verified reporting — provides a quick lift for politicians.

It’s not just Donald Trump. Trump’s rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently criticized “the Lefty media” for telling “lies” and broadcasting “a hoax” about his policies.

Criticizing the media emerged as an effective bipartisan political tactic in the 1960s. GOP Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign got the ball rolling by needling the so-called “Eastern liberal press.”

Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s lies about the Vietnam War clashed with accurate reporting, and a “credibility gap” arose — the growing public skepticism about the administration’s truthfulness — to the obvious irritation of the president. Johnson complained CBS News and NBC News were so biased he thought their reporting seemed “controlled by the Vietcong.”

Democrats like Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley, who complained bitterly about news coverage of the 1968 Democratic convention (labeling it “propaganda“) and Federal Communications Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, who published “How to Talk Back to Your Television Set” in 1970, argued that “Eastern,” “commercial” and “corporate” media interests warped or “censored” the news.

In 1969, Republican President Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, launched a public campaign against news corporations that instantly made him a conservative celebrity.

Agnew warned that increased concentration in news media ownership ensured control over public opinion by a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.” Similar criticism emerged from leftists, including MIT linguist Noam Chomsky.

The bipartisan popularity of news media criticism continued to grow as politicians found attacking the messengers the fastest way to avoid engaging in discussion of unpleasant realities. Turning the spotlight back on the media also helped political figures portray themselves as victims, while focusing partisan anger at specific villains.

Today, only 26% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the news media, according to a poll published in February by Gallup and the Knight Foundation. Americans across the political spectrum share a growing disdain for journalism — no matter how accurate, verified, professional or ethical.

Yet open debate over journalism ethics signals healthy governance. Such argumentation might amplify polarization, but it also facilitates the exchange of diverse opinions and encourages critical analyses of reality.

Journalistic failures damaged trust

Americans grew to distrust even the best news reporting because their political leadership encouraged it. But multiple failures exposed over the past several decades also further eroded journalistic credibility.

Long before bloggers ended Dan Rather’s CBS News career in 2005, congressional investigations, civil lawsuits, and scandals revealing unethical and unprofessional behavior within even the most respected journalism outlets doomed the profession’s public reputation.

In 1971, CBS News aired “The Selling of the Pentagon,” an investigation that revealed the government spent tax dollars to produce pro-military domestic propaganda during the Vietnam War.

The program infuriated U.S. Rep. Harley Staggers, who accused CBS of using “the nation’s airwaves…to deliberately deceive the public.”

Staggers launched an investigation and subpoenaed CBS News’ unpublished, confidential materials. CBS News President Frank Stanton defied the subpoena and was eventually vindicated by a vote of Congress. But Staggers, a West Virginia Democrat, publicly portrayed CBS News as biased by insinuating the network had much to hide. Many Americans agreed with him.

“The Selling of the Pentagon” was the first of many investigations and lawsuits that damaged the credibility of journalism by exposing — or threatening to expose — the messy process of assembling news. As with the recent embarrassing revelations about Fox News exposed by the Dominion lawsuit, whenever the public gets access to the backstage behavior, private opinions and hypocritical actions of professional journalists, reputations will suffer.

But even the remarkable Fox News revelations shouldn’t be considered unique.

Repeated lying

Numerous respected news organizations have been caught lying to their audiences. Though such episodes are rare, they can be enormously damaging.

In 1993, General Motors sued NBC News, accusing the network of deceiving the public by secretly attaching explosives to General Motors trucks, and then blowing them up to exaggerate a danger.

NBC News admitted it, settled the lawsuit and news division president Michael Gartner resigned. The case, concluded The Washington Post’s media critic, “will surely be remembered as one of the most embarrassing episodes in modern television history.”

Additional examples abound. Intentional deception — knowingly lying by consciously publishing or broadcasting fiction as fact — occurs often enough in professional journalism to cyclically embarrass the industry.

In cases such as Janet Cooke and The Washington Post, Stephen Glass and the New Republic, Jayson Blair and Michael Finkel of The New York Times, and Ruth Shalit Barrett and The Atlantic, the publication of actual fabrications was exposed.

These episodes of reportorial fraudulence were not simply errors caused by sloppy fact-checking or journalists being deceived by lying sources. In each case, journalists lied to improve their careers while trying to help their employers attract larger audiences with sensational stories.

This self-inflicted damage to journalism is every bit equal to the attacks launched by politicians.

Such malfeasance undermines confidence in the news media’s ability to fulfill its constitutionally protected responsibilities. If few Americans are willing to believe even the most verified and factual reporting, then the ideal of debate grounded in shared facts may become anachronistic. It may already be.

Media criticism as democratic participation

The pervasive amount of news media criticism in the U.S. has intensified the erosion of trust in American journalism.

But such discussion can be seen as a sign of democratic health.

“Everyone in a democracy is a certified media critic, which is as it should be,” media sociologist Michael Schudson once wrote. Imagine how intimidated citizens would respond to pollsters in Russia, China or North Korea if asked whether they trusted their media. To question official media “truth” in these nations is to risk incarceration or worse.

Just look at Russia. As Putin’s regime censored independent media and pumped out propaganda, the nation’s least skeptical citizens became the war’s foremost supporters.

As a media scholar and former journalist, I believe more reporting on the media, and criticism of journalism, is always better than less.

Even that Gallup-Knight Foundation report chronicling lost trust in the media concluded that “distrust of information or [media] institutions is not necessarily bad,” and that “some skepticism may be beneficial in today’s media environment.”

People choose the media they trust and criticize the media they consider less credible. Intentional deception scandals have been exposed at outlets as different as The New York Times, Fox News, and NBC News. Just as the effort to demean the media has long been bipartisan, revelations of malfeasance have historically plagued media across the political spectrum. Nobody can yet know the long-term effect the Dominion lawsuit will have on the credibility of Fox News specifically, but media scholars know the scandal will justifiably further erode the public’s trust in the media.

An enduring democracy will encourage rather than discourage media criticism. Attacks by politicians and exposure of unethical acts clearly lower public trust in journalism. But measured skepticism can be healthy and media criticism comprises an essential component of media literacy — and a vibrant democracy.

Among Tagle’s tips: “Do something that feels good for your body and helps you get out of your head.” Also: “The kitchen is a safe space for a lot of us. Maybe this is the weekend that you finally re-create Grandpa’s famous lasagna … or maybe just lose yourself in some kitchen organization.”

Tagle’s simple self-help counsel quickly ignited social media scorn, seemingly touching a nerve among numerous commentators.

National Review’s Dan McLaughlin tweeted that the piece indicated that NPR employees “really do not envision their audience as grown adults.”

“I’m all for mental health awareness and therapeutic care,” tweeted Daily Beast editor Anthony Fisher, before ultimately dismissing Tagle’s article as “a lifestyle guide for narcissists.”

The piece and its condemnation raise issues involving research about the mental and psychological toll of everyday news consumption that’s gone largely unnoticed by the public over the last few years. Recent surveys and research on the subject have only occasionally been publicized in the general press. The Covid-19 global pandemic — and the doomsday news reports it sparked — attracted a bit more attention to this research.

Yet the mental and psychological toll of news consumption remains largely unknown to the general news consumer. Even if the research isn’t widely known, the emotions felt by what one Northwestern University Medical School article called “headline stress disorder” probably exist for an certain unknown proportion of news consumers. After all, if these feelings didn’t exist for at least some of their listening audience, NPR would never have published that piece. Nor would Fox News have published a similar article to help its viewers cope.

News threatens mental stability

The idea that more news, delivered faster through new and addictive technologies, can cause psychological and medical harm has a long history in the United States.

Media scholars like Daniel Czitrom and Jeffrey Sconce have noted how contemporaneous research linked the emergence and prevalence of neurasthenia to the rapid proliferation of telegraphic news in the late 19th century. Neurasthenia is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a condition that is characterized especially by physical and mental exhaustion usually with accompanying symptoms (such as headache and irritability).” Early 19th-century scientific exploration in neurology and psychiatry suggested that too much news consumption might lead to “nervous exhaustion” and other maladies.

In my own research into social psychology and radio listening, I noticed the same medical descriptions recurring in the 1920s, once radio became widespread. News reports chronicled how radio listening and radio news consumption seemed to threaten some people’s mental stability.

Anxious about frightening news

“Headline stress disorder” might sound ridiculous to some, but research does show that reading the news can make certain subsets of news consumers develop measurable emotional effects.

There are numerous studies looking into this phenomenon. In general, they find some people, under certain conditions, can be vulnerable to potentially harmful and diagnosable levels of anxiety if exposed to certain types of news reports.

The problem for researchers is isolating the exact subset of news consumers this happens to, and describing precisely the effect that occurs in response to specific identified news subjects and methods of news consumption.

It is not only probable, but even likely, that many people are made more anxious by the widespread distribution of frightening news. And if a news consumer has a diagnosed anxiety disorder, depression, or other identified mental health challenge, the likelihood that obviously distressing news reports would amplify and inflame such underlying issues seems almost certain.

Just because popular culture manages to pathologize much of everyday behavior doesn’t mean identified problems aren’t real, as those skewering the NPR story implied.

We all eat; but some of us eat far too much. When that occurs, everyday behavior is transformed into actions that can threaten health and survival. Likewise, most of us strive to stay informed, but it’s likely that in certain situations, for certain people, staying informed when the news is particularly frightening can threaten their mental health.

Therefore, the question is not whether the problem is real, but how research might quantify and describe its true prevalence, and how to address the problem.

And that’s precisely why the NPR article caused such a stir. Many people who consume news without problem couldn’t fathom why others might benefit from learning how to cope with “headline stress disorder.”

In reality, the criticism aimed at NPR says nothing about those who find our current run of bad news particularly anxiety-provoking. It does say a lot about the lack of empathy from those who would scoff at the idea.

Perhaps you’ve heard otherwise. Much reporting focused upon the decline in traditional Olympic TV ratings. On Twitter, Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi went so far as to call the precipitous viewership decline a “catastrophic” development for NBC.

Ratings still matter. But focusing narrowly on ratings mistakenly applies a 20th-century audience metric to a 21st-century event. The classic audience measurement can’t conclusively determine NBC’s success. In evaluating the Tokyo Games by traditional TV measures, critics miss NBC’s insight about how media consumption is changing.

No TV programming other than the Olympics assembles almost 17 million viewers, every night, for two weeks, as the Tokyo Games did. Even if NBC ends up re-airing ads at no charge to make up for lower-than-expected on-air ratings, network officials remained confident that the Olympics coverage would be profitable. That’s no surprise, as NBC signed up more “premium advertisers” than in 2016 and set a record in advance advertising sales, with $1.25 billion booked before the torch was lit.

Yet broadcast television comprised only one component of NBC’s distribution mix. The Tokyo Games provided enormous amounts of video content divorced from a single channel. Americans watched on phones, on laptops, through cable partners such as NBC owner Comcast, and via streaming apps — as well as on traditional broadcast TV. Viewers shared clips across social media, providing free promotion and clicks, and, though the data is not yet available, it’s likely that many purchased subscriptions directly from NBC’s Peacock TV streaming service. Streaming on the Peacock app showed a 24% rise over 2016, and at one point, the app reached its largest audience ever.

With a few rare exceptions, the Olympics have historically been profitable for U.S. broadcasters while giving viewers a glimpse of the future of media. As my research on Olympic broadcasting has detailed, media innovations that eventually become commonplace are often first introduced at the Games.

The Olympics and video innovation

Since 1936, the Olympic Games have demonstrated the future of video distribution. The Berlin Games that year were distributed on the world’s first regularly scheduled television service. Although the images beamed into theaters around Berlin turned out to be largely disappointing due to lighting and technical issues, viewers were amazed at being able to observe an event occurring miles away in real time.

Perhaps the most innovative Olympic broadcast occurred in 1968, when ABC employed several new technologies in Mexico City. Color TV cameras had, until then, been bulky and onerous to use outside a studio, but ABC engineers introduced a new, smaller color camera at the Games.

Perhaps more important, the experimental stage of live intercontinental satellite video relay that had begun in the early 1960s concluded successfully when the Mexico City Olympics showed it was possible to provide live intercontinental satellite programming over two full weeks of events. The future of watching events, in color and beamed from around the planet as they occurred, had arrived.

The broadcasting of the Barcelona Games in 1992 was the first global TV programming to provide two full signals for every event — one in high definition and one standard. I worked for Radio Televisión Olímpica at the baseball venue that year, and I remember watching Japanese announcers installing specialized HD equipment because NHK, Japan’s Olympic broadcaster, was the only organization making full use of HDTV in 1992. I recall being dazzled by the clarity of the NHK signal.

NBC first tried selling broadcast service directly to viewers from Barcelona. The package was called “Olympics Triplecast,” and it offered three channels of 24-hour coverage for $29.95 per day, or $125 for the whole two weeks. Olympics Triplecast was widely considered a failure, as U.S. audiences — habituated by decades of free Olympic TV coverage — balked at payment.

With the arrival of subscription streaming, it appears Triplecast wasn’t so much a failure as too early. With the collapse of advertising-supported media and the rise of streaming services training audiences to pay for content, it appears the media market has arrived at the place NBC envisioned in 1992.

The audience paradox: Fewer viewers, more profits

Traditional commercial broadcasting was simple: Higher ratings generally created more advertiser demand, resulting in more expensive commercials and increased profitability. Yet even this basic model was slightly wrong — as scholars have shown, ad agencies and networks always measured audiences by demographic characteristics. Not all viewers were equal, as some programs with smaller audiences commanded higher prices because they moved consumer products more effectively. In general, however, the larger the audience, the higher the price.

But when alternatives — first cable TV, then the web, and now social media — began siphoning off viewers, the old model transformed. Ratings declined everywhere, as additional options made concentrating the traditional mass audience for even huge events, like the Academy Awards, more difficult.

An ironic phenomenon then emerged: A few select video spectacles could defy the decline and make more money, even while losing viewers. The Olympics proved the most successful example, as NBC’s ratings from 2012 to 2016 declined about 15%, yet the 2016 Rio Games produced the network’s record profit for an Olympics, $250 million.

How could smaller audiences lead to more ad revenue? The answer lies in the concept of scarcity, and the evolution of media. With so many options to choose from, programs that are able to assemble mass audiences — even if those audiences are smaller and shrinking — became more valuable precisely because there are so few of them.

That’s how NBC keeps selling the Games so effectively. It knows its primary customers are ad agencies, not viewers. And ad agencies understand the scarcity of the Olympic opportunity.

The other way NBC is generating profitability involves selling Olympic programming directly to viewers. The Olympics now consist of video content, not a television show. Success, for NBC, can’t be accurately measured until the number of paid Peacock TV subscriptions is fully tabulated and the quadrennial bump in adjacent NBC non-Olympic programming is known. The Olympics traditionally lifts everything on the network, from The Today Show to NBC Nightly News. NBC monetizes the Games in ways that many critics don’t seem to consider.

If paid Peacock TV subscriptions do well, then we’ll all likely remember the Tokyo Games as the evolutionary moment when many Americans first realized they would need to pay up to watch live sports. “The future is now” was Hall of Fame NFL coach George Allen’s favorite saying, and when it comes to the economics of live sports programming, the Tokyo Olympics show that we’ve arrived.

Enticed by the independence from editorial oversight Substack offers, several media figures with large followings — including Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Anne Helen Peterson, and Matthew Yglesias — are now striking out on their own.

Substack has also elevated a few commentators — perhaps most notably Heather Cox Richardson, the Boston College historian whose “Letters from an American” is currently Substack’s most-subscribed feature — to near-celebrity status.

Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s co-founder, has compared his company’s promise to an earlier journalistic revolution, likening Substack to the “penny papers” of the 1830s, when printers exploited new technology to make newspapers cheap and ubiquitous. Those newspapers — sold on the street for $0.01 — were the first to exploit mass advertising to lower newspapers’ purchase prices. Proliferating throughout the United States, they launched a new media era.

McKenzie’s analogy isn’t quite right. I believe journalism history offers more context for considering Substack’s future. If Substack is successful, it will remind news consumers that paying for good journalism is worth it.

But if Substack’s pricing precludes widespread distribution of its news and commentary, its value as a public service won’t be fully realized.

Mass advertising subsidized “objective” journalism

I believe Substack’s subscription-based plan is, in fact, closer to the model of journalism that preceded the penny papers. The older versions of U.S. newspapers were relatively expensive and generally read by elite subscribers. The penny papers democratized information by mass-producing news. They widened distribution and lowered the price to reach those previously unable to buy daily newspapers.

Substack, on the other hand, isn’t prioritizing advertising revenue, and by pricing content at recurring subscription levels, it’s restricting, rather than expanding, access to news and commentary that, for a long time, news organizations have traditionally provided free on the web.

History has shown that the economic basis of American journalism is deeply entangled with its style and tone. When one primary revenue source replaces another, much larger evolutions in the information environment occur. The 1830s, again, offer an instructional example.

One morning in 1836, James Watson Webb, the editor of New York City’s most respected newspaper, the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, chased down James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald, and beat Bennett with his cane. For weeks, Bennett had been insulting Webb and his newspaper in The Herald.

In his study of journalistic independence and its relationship to the origins of “objectivity” as an established practice in U.S. journalism, historian David Mindich identifies Webb’s assault on Bennett as a revealing historical moment. The Webb-Bennett rivalry distinguishes two distinct economic models of American journalism.

Before the “penny press” revolution, U.S. journalism was largely subsidized by political parties or printers with political ambition. Webb, for example, coined the name “Whig” for the political party his newspaper helped organize in the 1830s with commercial and mercantile interests, largely in response to the emergence of Jacksonian democracy. Webb’s newspaper catered to his (mostly) Whig subscribers, and its pages were filled with biased partisan commentary and correspondence submitted by his Whig friends.

Bennett’s Herald was different. Untethered from any specific political party, it sold for one penny (though its price soon doubled) to a mass audience coveted by advertisers. Bennett hired reporters — a newly invented job — to capture stories everyone wanted to read, regardless of their political loyalty.

His circulation soon tripled Webb’s, and the profits generated by The Herald’s advertising offered Bennett enormous editorial freedom. He used it to attack rivals, publish wild stories about crime and sex, and to continually stoke more demand for The Herald by giving readers what they clearly enjoyed.

Huge circulation propelled newspapers like Bennett’s Herald and Benjamin Day’s New York Sun to surpass Webb’s Morning Courier and Enquirer in relevance and influence. Webb’s newspaper cost a pricy 6 cents for far less timely and exciting news.

It should be noted, however, that the penny papers’ nonpartisan independence didn’t ensure civic responsibility. To increase sales, the Sun, in 1835, published entirely fictional “reports” claiming a fantastic new telescope had detected life on the moon. Its circulation skyrocketed.

In this sense, editorial independence encouraged publication of what’s now called “fake news” and sensationalistic reports unchecked by editorial oversight.

Substack: A blogging platform with a toll gate?

Perhaps “I.F. Stone’s Weekly” offers the closest historical antecedent for Substack. Stone was an experienced muckraking journalist who began self-publishing an independent, subscription-based newsletter in the early 1950s.

Yet unlike much of Substack’s most famous names, Stone was more reporter than pundit. He’d pore over government documents, public records, congressional testimony, speeches and other overlooked material to publish news ignored by traditional outlets. He often proved prescient: His skeptical reporting on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, questioning the idea of an unprovoked North Vietnamese naval attack, for example, challenged the U.S. government’s official story, and was later vindicated as more accurate than comparable reportage produced by larger news organizations.

There are more recent antecedents to Substack’s go-it-yourself ethos. Blogging, which proliferated in the U.S. media ecosystem earlier this century, encouraged profuse and diverse news commentary. Blogs revived the opinionated invective that James Gordon Bennett loved to publish in The Herald, but they also served as a vital fact-checking mechanism for American journalism.

The direct parallel between blogging and Substack’s platform has been widely noted. In this sense, it’s not surprising that Andrew Sullivan — one of the most successful early bloggers — is now returning to the format.

Information doesn’t want to be free

Even if Substack proves simply an updated blogging service with an uncomplicated tollbooth, it still represents improvement over the “tip jar” financing model and reader appeals that revealed the financial weakness of all but the most famous blogs.

This might be Substack’s most important service. By explicitly asserting that good journalism and commentary are worth paying for, Substack might help retrain web audiences accustomed to believing information is free.

Misguided media corporations persuaded the web’s earliest news consumers that big advertisers would sustain a healthy news ecosystem that didn’t need to charge readers. Yet that economic model, pioneered by the penny papers, has clearly failed. And journalism is still sorting out the ramifications for the industry — and democracy — of its collapse.

It costs money to produce professional, ethical journalism, whether in the 1830s, the 1980s or the 2020s. Web surfing made us forget this. If Substack can help correct this misapprehension, and ensure that journalists are properly remunerated for their labor, it could help remedy our damaged news environment, which is riddled with misinformation.

But Substack’s ability to democratize information will be directly related to the prices its authors choose to charge. If prices are kept low, or if discounts for multiple bundled subscriptions are widely implemented, audiences will grow and Substack’s influence will likely extend beyond an elite readership.

After all: They were called “penny papers” for a reason.

This is useful for both commerce and public service. But the rush for novelty can prioritize sensationalism over depth, and elevate the newest tidbit of information over more important reporting.

Examples of this include reporting on such unimportant and inconsequential tweets by President Donald Trump as his bizarre accusation that a morning cable TV host murdered somebody, or his pride in the ratings for his pandemic press conferences.

When novelty replaces context, the ironic result is a less-informed but more up-to-date public.

Media easy to exploit

This is particularly true in times of long-running historical events, such as the current pandemic.

When a clear beginning, middle, and resolution are not discernible, the demand for any morsel of new information can confuse, rather than clarify, the story.

Journalists rushing to amplify any small update can mistakenly inflate its importance with sensational headlines or hyperbolic broadcast framing.

For example: the widespread discussion of hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure — it wasn’t — or the celebrated roll-out of the CDC’s guidelines for a safe reopening of the economy, now appear, in retrospect, to be relatively insignificant, especially because numerous states are reopening without following the CDC’s recommended metrics.

Faded in memory now are things like the announcement of Google’s tracking website, and the national drive-through testing plan, both of which never materialized but resulted in major headlines and widespread discussion in the wake of their announcement.

Traditionally, editorial news assessment of presidential assertions was simple: if the president said something, it was, by definition, newsworthy.

Yet the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how journalism’s traditional bias for novelty can result in front-page, top-of-the-broadcast news stories that are provably inaccurate, and even occasionally fictional. The tendency of journalists to inflate the value of certain new information makes the media manipulable and easy to exploit.

President Trump realizes this. That’s why he tweets so much. He understands the content of any tweet is less important than its immediacy, and how his tweets pressure journalists to amplify unimportant messages on social media.

He knows that what he actually says in a tweet is less important than that there’s a new tweet — and how such newness motivates journalists to redirect focus from ongoing problems that lack new developments to the tweet itself.

Lost in this confusing swirl is repetition’s power. News organizations find little value in republishing, or rebroadcasting, news everyone already knows. The goal for journalists has long been known as “advancing the story.”

But sometimes the biggest story does not advance as quickly as journalists might hope. It is in these moments of seeming stasis that journalistic repetition can become more powerful and serve as a way to hold government accountable.

Here’s one example: The states around the country that have moved to reopen their economies without achieving benchmarks proposed by the CDC. There are indications in Texas, for example, that this is resulting in increased spread of COVID-19.

This isn’t a one-day story; nor is the news simply the opening of these states. The White House’s own “Opening Up America Again” guidelines are public, easily accessed, and could be continually referenced in stories about safely reopening the economy. Doing so would provide important context for the public about national and state leadership.

If the guidelines turn out to be wrong, that would offer important information about the CDC and the White House. If they turn out to be correct, decisions to deviate from them will similarly provide valuable information to the citizenry.

Repetition, journalism and civic responsibility

American journalism enjoys constitutional protection precisely because the founders recognized its educational role in civic governance.

Yet journalism’s avoidance of repetition can be viewed as detrimental to this public education mandate. That the president has provably misled the media and the public with such regularity during the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be “old news” at this point.

The imperative for “new” news deters reminders in the lead paragraphs in newspaper articles, or at the top of news broadcasts, that much of what the president has said and tweeted about the pandemic has been inaccurate and disproven.

Though journalism scholarship contains few content analyses of repetition in long-running news stories, broadcast history provides evidence of its value.

ABC’s lucrative Nightline franchise was born out of a series of nightly updates — often about the lack of progress — during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980.

Daily coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994-1995 raised cable TV news ratings and profits to record levels and sparked national conversations about race, celebrity and the justice system.

And now the COVID-19 crisis has catapulted ABC News’ World News Tonight to the top spot in the national TV ratings for weeks. Viewership data proves the U.S. public is avidly following the story.

Journalists, however, seem to be tiring of it. Like body counts in Vietnam, days the hostages remained in Tehran or the number of positive COVID-19 tests, reciting dry numbers requires little effort.

For journalists, repeating data provided by governmental authorities can eventually become monotonous. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently told The New Yorker, describing his team’s efforts covering the crisis, “there’s probably some fatigue setting in.”

Reporting something different now, Hayes added, was, “in a weird way, liberating, because it means you don’t feel beaten into the ground by repetition.”

Using the word “liberating” implies that Hayes, and other journalists, are feeling entrapped.

Yet, rather than complain, they might consider this a professional challenge. When body counts bored reporters in the Vietnam War, they went into the field to add irony, wit and emotion to their reports. Journalists like Peter Arnett, Jack Laurence, and Morley Safer composed distinctive and powerful stories capturing the mood and atmosphere in Vietnam.

Many unexplored angles on the COVID-19 epidemic await creative treatment. But they require imagination, skill and the investment of time, patience and money to produce.

News isn’t always what’s new. Sometimes it’s the barely perceptible moments that tired journalists might overlook. Failure to capture and communicate those stories, because they might not contain the most recent morsel of information, could have political consequences today, and could misinform historians portraying this pandemic tomorrow.

Miller’s response began “Two different points…” when Wallace cut him off. “How about answering my question?” Wallace asked.

Miller, changing the subject, ignored Wallace. Wallace’s question was never answered.

Then it happened again. Jake Tapper hosted Congressman Jim Jordan on his CNN show State of the Union. As the interview closed, Jordan simply started ignoring Tapper’s questions and giving his talking points instead. The interview concluded with a visibly frustrated Tapper signaling disappointment about his guest’s avoidance of simple and direct questions.

Master class in interviewing: Chris Wallace on Stephen Miller (on FOX) and @jaketapper on Rep. Jim Jordan (on CNN).

Living up to Tim Russert’s legacy.

— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) September 29, 2019

Both interviews clarified little. These clashes between recalcitrant guests and flustered hosts created sensational television, but rather than enlighten, as journalism should do, they muddied the story for uninformed viewers.

Audiences critiqued the behavior of the interviewer and interviewees using viral clips on social media, but little was noted about the troublesome aspects of the format itself. The live TV interview, with its tightly constricted parameters, has much to do with the journalistic failure that occurred. What happened in these interviews recurs with such regularity that the failure of this exercise is, by now, entirely predictable.

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the journalistic value of live interviews — and return to a standard that reflects what viewers should expect from news programming.

Live interviews were once rare

When radio broadcasting emerged in the 1920s, unscripted live interviews were rare. Radio networks and stations carefully policed their airwaves lest something too disagreeable, spontaneous, or controversial cause problems with sponsors or the Federal Communications Commission. As media history and radio studies scholar Jason Loviglio notes, even popular “vox pop” shows (featuring people-on-the-street interviews) were often scripted.

During World War II, broadcast interviews were diligently monitored by the Office of Censorship and the Office of War Information. Scripts of interviews with soldiers and homefront citizens alike were often censored to prevent a war secret accidentally slipping through.

After the war, radio documentary reporters began asking interviewees critical and even occasionally antagonistic questions in their recordings. But soon the anticommunism infecting American politics made broadcasters wary of unscripted responses. Controversial guests were either blacklisted by the networks or carefully vetted. News interview shows became largely friendly and promotional.

Villains and controversy remained rare even on journalist Edward R. Murrow’s celebrated programs, See It Now and Person to Person. When they did appear — as in the famous broadcasts featuring Sen. Joseph McCarthy — they were shown mostly in selectively edited film clips.

Then Mike Wallace arrived. Beginning with Night Beat, a local New York City program aired in 1956 and 1957, Wallace transformed the broadcast interview.

In the new documentary Mike Wallace Is Here, clips illustrate Wallace’s revolutionary approach. He could be sarcastic, probing, antagonistic and critical. On both Night Beat and ABC’s The Mike Wallace Interview, Wallace proved a relentless inquisitor. Acting the prosecutor, Wallace watched a procession of gangsters, corrupt politicians, and celebrities flinch and dissemble — from segregationist Sen. James Eastland to the controversial author Ayn Rand.

But Wallace’s abrasive style failed to fit the sunny optimism of the Kennedy years. When legal problems and dipping ratings ended his program’s run, the Wallace style wouldn’t return until the late 1960s.

That’s when the credibility gap — caused largely by the government’s misinformation about such issues as the Vietnam War and the audience’s growing skepticism in an age of assassinations and turmoil — had so widened that critics like The New Yorker’s Michael Arlen argued that television news required more forceful and critical interviewing.

In 1968, CBS News assembled a new news magazine — called 60 Minutes — that forever changed American television. Although hampered by low ratings in its initial years, Wallace, its star, soon emerged as America’s crusading TV reporter. He’d grill everyone — from the small-time con artist to the president, from dictators to celebrities — to expose their weaknesses and reveal their humanity.

“Imam,” he said to Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis of 1979, “President Sadat [of Egypt], a devoutly religious man…says that what you are doing now is, quote, a disgrace to Islam, and he calls you — forgive me, his words, not mine — a ‘lunatic.'” The ayatollah responded by calling for Sadat’s overthrow.

The 60 Minutes effect

60 Minutes spawned numerous imitators. Its mix of sensational investigations, celebrity profiles, and engaging stories made it one of the longest-running (and most profitable) network TV shows. It proved just how much money good TV interviews might earn.

60 Minutes relied upon carefully produced and edited interviews. But soon satellite technology facilitated live remote interviewing, and the live TV interview format became common. A key evolutionary moment occurred in 1979, when ABC inaugurated a series of shows about the Iran hostage crisis that evolved into Nightline.

Nightline host Ted Koppel bore in on guests with icy precision. Koppel’s interviews with everyone from the disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye to Nelson Mandela became memorable moments in broadcast journalism history. “Is it going to be possible for you to get through an interview without wrapping yourselves in the Bible?” he asked the Bakkers.

Other TV interviewers, including Barbara Walters and Larry King, developed their own idiosyncratic styles for both live and taped programs. Audiences loved their favorite interviewers, and the TV interview reliably delivered high ratings and lucrative ad revenue.

But nothing equaled 60 Minutes. At its ratings apex, the program’s most attractive feature remained those Mike Wallace interviews. On Sunday nights, after NFL football, Mike Wallace’s weekly inquisition became an American TV ritual.

The legacy of 60 Minutes is mixed. Many young reporters idolized Wallace, and soon every TV market in America had its investigative I-teams revealing local swindles. Antagonistic interviews with bad guys became routine.

By the 1980s, talk shows with hosts like Morton Downey Jr. began inviting guests to appear in order to belittle them. Downey generated high ratings by yelling “Shut up!” at everyone in the studio. Later, at Fox News, Bill O’Reilly’s hectoring and insults also produced high ratings. Encouraged, TV news interviewers yelled more. Guests soon realized this, and began preparing more carefully by strategically rehearsing talking points and planning to ignore questions in favor of repeating their own messages.

The interviews by Jake Tapper and Chris Wallace — who is of course Mike Wallace’s son — represent the culmination of this trajectory. It was entirely predictable that their two guests Sunday would stonewall any semblance of dialogue.

Journalism’s obligation

The cable channels have no one to blame but themselves. They have boxed themselves in with the popularity of their live interview shows and found success with a format that is both constricting and ripe for exploitation.

60 Minutes very rarely aired live interviews because that program’s producers knew live TV can be commandeered. On a live broadcast, when a guest misbehaves or misinforms the audience, a host has few options. They can ungraciously argue and yell, but that might inspire sympathy for the interviewee. They can cut off the microphone, but that might incite charges of censorship.

There’s one option that could be considered by these programs: not inviting guests who will mislead audiences with provably inaccurate information.

The Biden campaign recently asked that Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, be excluded from interviews for these journalistic reasons. The request argues that the balance between informing and misinforming viewers is a journalistic question, not a political one.

Ultimately, this is not an ethical issue of “balance” or fairness. Citizens require credible, verified, and accurate information to perform their democratic responsibilities. There’s no journalistic obligation to disseminate views that mislead, misdirect, or offer irrelevant information designed to intentionally confuse viewers. In fact, there is a journalistic obligation to do the opposite.

To fulfill their democratic and journalistic responsibilities, perhaps TV news operations airing these programs could consider inviting alternative guests and changing the standard format. That way, we could all be more reliably informed.

The United States has a tradition of learning troubling news through extraordinary reporting efforts from combat zones. During the Vietnam War, award-winning journalism revealed the slaughter of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers at My Lai. More recently, reports describing the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq embarrassed the U.S. government. Such investigative reporting ultimately helped American citizens hold accountable those charged with acting in their name. But that didn’t mean the news was welcome, or even appreciated, at the time.

It’s important to recall these examples in light of the raid by the Australian Federal Police at the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on June 5.

As an American Fulbright Research Scholar studying media at the University of Canberra in Australia, I’ve watched this controversy closely. Comparing the way these two western democracies protect — and undermine — investigative reporting raises important questions about journalism’s role in democracy.

The Australian police acted in response to a series of online and broadcast news stories, called “The Afghan Files,” that originally appeared in 2017 and 2018. The reports alleged atrocities were committed in Afghanistan by Australian soldiers. The police obtained a warrant to search the premises and computers of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in order to uncover — and possibly indict and prosecute — the sources informing the story.

The leaking of such embarrassing secret information likely violated Australian law, leaving both the leaker and the ABC vulnerable. The Australian police’s broad warrant allowed the police to spend hours copying “data holdings,” including hard drive files, emails, and other documents, and they left the network’s headquarters in possession of USB drives filled with electronic files related to the Afghanistan stories.

The ABC’s lawyers secured a two-week period in which to carefully review the documents seized by police. But Australian journalists lack both the constitutional protections and the established body of case law that often allow American journalists to protect their sources.

Power from profitability is no more

The destruction of the advertising profits that funded ethical and professional journalism has made journalistic outlets less enthusiastic about supporting bold and difficult reporting. There are fewer reporters to carry out this painstaking and time-consuming reporting, and the financial peril faced by many news organizations has left them more vulnerable to attack.

Journalism is now in a transitional state. The kind of power that outlets like CBS News and The Washington Post possessed in the Watergate era was based in the enormous commercial profitability that effectively insulated investigative journalism. Controversial reportage — no matter how accurate and verified — is now regularly derided as “fake news.” Whether produced by CNN in the United States, Al Jazeera in Qatar, or even by a state broadcaster like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (which has seen its funding cut in recent years), unwelcome information is quickly attacked and dismissed.

The public’s support for independent and critical reportage is essential to sustaining it. Without it, the governments of such leaders as Donald Trump, Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and even Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Australia, can act with impunity to intimidate and even silence journalists. The global attacks on the media are having a cumulative effect: Support for journalism is eroding even in Western democracies, according to journalism advocates Reporters Without Borders.

Police warrants mean intimidation

The Australian police raid wasn’t the only one aimed at journalists in recent weeks. On May 24, San Francisco’s chief of police was forced to apologize for raiding a journalist’s home two weeks earlier. Aside from violating the Constitution, the San Francisco Police Department may have broken California’s journalistic shield law. That law was designed to protect the ability of journalists to keep sources confidential.

But in Australia, shortly before the ABC raid, authorities searched a newspaper journalist’s home in the nation’s capital, looking to discover her source for a report about a secret government surveillance plan. Though the press howled in outrage, the raid was legal.

In the United States, the closest parallel to the ABC search occurred in 1971, in response to the CBS Reports documentary “The Selling of the Pentagon.” That program revealed how taxpayer funding underwrote domestic propaganda to convince Americans to support the military during the controversial Vietnam War. “The Selling of the Pentagon” made allegations of impropriety and illegality. Public controversy erupted immediately.

At least two government representatives claimed the film had been manipulated to alter the substance of their remarks, resulting in a congressional subcommittee demanding to see CBS News’ draft scripts and film outtakes.

Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, rejected the subpoena, arguing that all reporting materials were protected by the First Amendment. After announcing he was prepared to go to jail to protect CBS journalism, the public rallied in favor of the network and the House committee voted to stand down.

Stanton’s ability to challenge Congress occurred because he had the backing of his corporate board. And his defiance was empowered by public support for journalistic liberty. By the time “The Selling of the Pentagon” aired on CBS, the American public had turned against the war and viewed the Pentagon with suspicion. Attacking CBS News backfired on Congress and the Pentagon, as the documentary’s charges were given new life by continuing press coverage.

The same thing seems to be occurring now with the heavy-handed tactics employed by the Australian police. Australians are, courtesy of the police, being reminded of the original ABC reporting. It’s become so embarrassing to the government that Prime Minister Morrison — after stating he’s “never troubled” by police who are upholding the law — has now said that his government “is absolutely committed to freedom of the press.”

In my opinion, Morrison’s reversal is simple: He’s sensed public opinion turning against his administration’s anti-press tactics.

The chilling effect

Whether it was “The Selling of the Pentagon” or “The Afghan Files,” these intimidation tactics are never primarily concerned with the reporting at hand. In both cases, the stories were already public. Any damage they caused had already been absorbed by the time the governments sought remedy. The real purpose of these legal actions is to discourage new independent reporting in the public interest.

Courageous journalism is critical to democracy, and its role in checking the power of state authority is essential. These moves against future investigative stories are actually attacks by the state on democratic governance and the authority of the citizenry.

If law enforcement in the U.S. or Australia can lodge doubts and instill fears in the minds of journalists and their sources, or if they can get news organizations to shy away from controversial stories, then these raids will have served their purpose — even if no follow-up charges result. It’s called the “chilling effect,” and its success can only be measured in the negative — when stories aren’t reported.

That hesitation and uncertainty in the mind of every journalist and confidential source represents the real damage to democracy. But it’s something that will receive far less publicity than any police raid.

Before Alex Jones and InfoWars, there was Glenn Beck.

A decade ago, Beck was hawking his conspiracy theories on HLN and Fox News. Beck eventually left HLN and lost the Fox News job, just as the inflammatory Morton Downey Jr. had lost his lucrative syndicated broadcast decades earlier.

And before Morton Downey Jr., there was Joe Pyne, the war hero who eventually ended up railing against “hippies, homosexuals, and feminists” on the airwaves in the 1960s.

Before Pyne, there was Father Coughlin, “the radio priest.” Coughlin was eased off CBS in the 1930s when he refused to allow the network to vet his inflammatory commentary.

You get the idea: Alex Jones is not unique. Nor do I believe, as a historian of American media, that he will be the last of his kind.

Public airwaves in private hands

Earlier this week, Jones’ InfoWars content was banned by Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and other web content distributors. It apparently violated policies against hate speech and inciting violence.

Whether you agree or disagree with the decision to constrict the reach of Jones’ toxic videos, the upholding of these speech policies by commercial corporations represents a thorny historical issue in existence since the inception of broadcasting in the U.S.

Traditionally, it’s not been state censorship that’s cleansed American public debate. Rather, since the advent of electronic communication, commercial corporations have often acted out of fear of reprisal — from both the government and the public.

The U.S. regulatory system for broadcasting began in 1912, when the Commerce Department assumed an administrative role that up until then had been haphazardly applied by different governmental agencies.

That system lasted until it was struck down by a U.S. federal court ruling in 1926, which resulted in Congress establishing the the Federal Radio Commission the next year and its successor, the Federal Communications Commission in 1934. Each regulatory entity generally ceded supervision of broadcast content to independent, commercial entities acting as licensees of the airwaves.

This means the U.S. government has entrusted, and continues to entrust, private corporations with structuring public debate and discussion. Regulators are empowered to act but rarely do, because the expectation that independent outlets remain responsible and civic-minded is deeply ingrained in the American system.

The web is governed by different protocols than broadcast media. The web was invented to share information widely and open up new spaces for community interaction, exchange, and engagement that the old mass media made difficult (if not impossible).

The web’s inventors saw their role in contrast to broadcast media: as facilitating rather than censoring. The regulatory system that specifically indemnifies and protects them from content posted under their banners is a recognition of this status.

So despite this new, open, democratic and accessible ideal of the web — the opposite of corporate-owned traditional broadcast media — the fact that mass web access to the American public remains largely controlled by corporate gatekeepers such as Facebook and Google may seem surprising.

Yet history, in the guise of Alex Jones and InfoWars, seems to have cast these social media and search engine giants into a more traditional role.

Google and Facebook might not want to police the marketplace of ideas, but it appears that they have little choice at this point. The creation they spawned is now littered with crackpots and conspiracy theorists, and it’s been exploited by a foreign government to damage the American political system.

But strong believers in the unfettered exchange of ideas as embodied by the First Amendment can take comfort in knowing the moves to limit peddlers of hate and lies like InfoWars won’t actually change much. There will be another Alex Jones in existence eventually. It’s the American way.

From self-invention to crazy

When Richard Hofstadter, the noted American historian, published “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” he identified a timeless and universal problem inherent in American political discourse. Freakish conspiracy beliefs have continually given rise to such movements as the Know Nothings in the 1850s and the John Birch Society in the 1950s.

Long before Hofstadter, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that a particularly American insecurity sprung from the ideology of democratic equality. In societies where everyone knows their place — say, in the caste system of India or the traditional aristocratic hierarchies of Europe — the lack of personal opportunity and social mobility often creates apathy and acquiescence. But in the United States, where everyone is officially born equal, we are supposedly empowered to make of ourselves what we will.

Whether it’s unscientific anti-vaccination theories, anti-Semitic rantings, or baldfaced scientific racism, anybody can be an “expert” in America simply by proclaiming their expertise. Though this expertise might be assisted by celebrity, it’s in no way beholden to education or class. That’s the American way.

Failure begets conspiracy thinking

The Alex Joneses, Glenn Becks, and Father Coughlins in our media world represent fissures in our dominant ideology of success. When the American Dream isn’t working out well, scapegoats must be found. And a large audience of disappointed people looking for excuses will always exist. Their civics textbooks and teachers taught them that hard work, diligence, obedience to authority, and responsible living inevitably results in economic prosperity.

But it often doesn’t work out that way. They feel lied to, and InfoWars exists to confirm their suspicions. Because there will always exist a rabble to be aroused, this is the space that rabble-rousers historically exploit.

They speak to — and claim to speak for — not simply the downtrodden and downwardly mobile; they also speak to those feeling wronged and forgotten. They simultaneously soothe and stoke the anxieties and insecurities of Americans living in a world that’s increasingly complex and beyond comprehension. Author Julia Belluz interviewed Jones’ fans and wrote, “I learned that Jones’s listeners felt let down by government, medicine and the media.”

People turn to Jones and Beck for the same reason they tuned in the earlier incarnations — to obtain answers that explain their experience. That’s a rational choice that sadly often results in an irrational outcome. The conspiracy theorists are always very good at giving details, but they tend to be far less effective at imparting information and knowledge.

Whether Jones believes his theories or not — and there exists some question about this — InfoWars looks like little more than a classic American con job. Even Jones’ attorneys have argued that “no reasonable person” could believe what he says.

That’s ultimately why Jones is just a symptom. Conspiracies are interwoven into the fabric of our national culture, and, as Jesse Walker pointed out in United States of Paranoia, they are so cyclical and persistent as to be thematically detectable across centuries. As long as insecurity and anxiety can be exploited, there will be new versions of InfoWars to pollute our nation. How’s that for a conspiracy theory?