Back in 1963 people thought they were seeing the future when Gordon Cooper spent a day in outer space circling the earth. But when I look back now at the long weekend after John Kennedy's assassination, I realize that was the big time-warped glimpse into the twenty-first century. In 1963 it was unprecedented and bizarre to have nothing but news and discussions of news events airing on all three TV channels around the clock for days on end, and to have that clip of Ruby shooting Oswald played again and again. I sit with a plastic pint of sugar-free green-tea gelato and a purring Clarence Darrow on my lap, flipping between MSNBC and CNN and FOX, driven from one to the other and back by ads for pharmaceuticals and gold. On every channel, people are talking about the latest breakdown of talks with Iran. In the last forty-five minutes, I've listened to a dozen different anchors and experts and commentators and have learned absolutely nothing I didn't know from reading the story in the newspaper this morning. For a few months last year, when I stopped watching cable news altogether, I think I felt slightly mellower and happier, like when I gave up cigarettes and Diet Coke, or when mosquito season ends. And as with cigarettes, I've come to believe cable news is slowly killing us, giving us intellectual emphysema, cancer of the mind. After all, people smoked for the better part of a century before they really knew it could be fatal.
True Believers, Kurt Andersen
