Why Is There Even the News?
A special investigation.
Hi friends!
The internet metastasized to my brain about fifteen years ago, and doctors still haven’t found a cure. Which is why, when bad news exits my phone and enters my loving consciousness, I often think of this quote from Anna Nicole Smith that I probably first saw on Tumblr.
Why is there even the news? Why do they have it? It just totally depresses people.
— Anna Nicole Smith, The Anna Nicole Show (2001)
Anna Nicole, an underrated pop culture prophet, was ahead of her time, both in questioning why we even have the news and being high on prescription drugs when she did so. She was speaking from experience, not only as a consumer of the news, but as the subject of it. Her public image rose at a time when celebrity was still a creation of the media, not a pursuit accessible to anyone shameless, charismatic, or caked enough to build a following. Unlike today’s public figures, she had no control over her image and no access to a platform where she could speak in her own voice at a moment’s notice. The public was deeply fascinated with her, and in a media environment that was about ratings, she captured an audience.
It’s easy to point the (middle) finger at algorithms when we lament the current state of media and culture, but follow the trail of madness and it almost always tracks back to television. To understand how we ended up here, asking why the news even exists, we must look to CNN’s 24-hour news cycle, and Ted Turner, the man who invented it.
Before CNN launched on cable in 1980, TV news in the United States was dominated by the three major network stations: ABC, CBS, and NBC. TV news had time constraints — broadcasts were 30 to 60 minutes long and only aired once or twice a day. Big stories might interrupt regularly scheduled programming to provide live coverage, but radio was where you went to get breaking news at all hours. When he invented the 24-hour news cycle for CNN, Turner predicted that watching global events unfold in realtime would enrapture the world, and his successful bet created a completely new paradigm that we’re still living in. All that time and space to fill meant the definition of news expanded, and that swelling river of information eventually flowed into the wide, uncharted sea of the internet. Only then did the tectonic shift of algorithms unleash a tsunami of opinions and bots talking shit in the comments.
Fox News launched in 1996. Without CNN as its predecessor and counterpoint, it might not even exist. No Fox News and the world is on an alternate timeline that’s not dominated by the political actions of one Donald Trump.
So, yeah.
The news.
Why exactly do we have it?
The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985)
Who Even Is the News?
At the end of last year, Pew did a survey that found one-in-five Americans admitting they regularly get their news from “news influencers” on social media. Unsurprisingly, younger people were much more likely to say this, with nearly 40% of Gen Z respondents saying they get their news from honestly who knows on apps that are bilking our brain juice for ad revenue. Makes sense, they’re much too young to know that this country was once in a parasocial relationship with Walter Cronkite.
I’m not a journalist, but if I called myself one and started shrieking about headlines on TikTok, I doubt anyone would bat an eye. I am a creator, and this is my economy. And in my economy, the dumbest, most manipulative shit, not the essential truth, reaches an audience most easily. Credentials are meaningless when the goal is attention. The news is all of us now: LIVE from bed, sharing a crazy headline to our Instagram story, typing “lol how is this not the onion,” and waiting for the likes to roll in.
What Even Is the News?
The news is a bastion of pertinent, vetted information in a monoculture that’s still contained by gatekeepers. Experience, not a preternatural ability to build a personal brand, is respected. Everyone agrees that a free press (not to be confused with The Free Press) is the cornerstone of a democracy that definitely still exists.
Sike!
The idea of newsworthiness was once tied to a journalist’s perspective, but here in 2026, it is most often the viewer who decides what the news even is. With the volume of voices and opinions on social media, the onus falls on the audience to edit all of this information into coherence. What was once a passive activity of consumption has become a personalized experience of discernment. Many of us never asked to be editor-in-chief of this psychic violence and are leaving our phones in another dimension so the doom can’t find us. Others just want to ingest hot takes that confirm an existing bias.
Where Even Is the News?
It’s right behind you, holding a knife to your throat.
When Even Is the News?
It’s constant and shows no mercy this many years unconstrained from its printed page or time slot. Our tender souls yearn to make the continuous information stop. One day, I hope someone asks me to do one of those questionnaires about my media consumption so I can wax poetic on how I genuinely try to avoid knowing anything at all hours of the day, and yet, here I am. Not only am I mysteriously abreast of the latest happenings, I comment on them for my beloved cult following. News is magnetically attracted to my psyche. Information appears out of the ether and enters my head. Time is a construct, and the news is infinite. A therapist would suggest creating stronger boundaries with it.
Why Is There Even the News?
On the other timeline, where Ted Turner is visited by The Ghost of Media Yet to Come and aborts the launch of CNN, newspapers grow on trees, and magazines aren’t some relic fetishized by the chronically online. On that timeline, I am saying all of this to you through a bullhorn at the Port Authority; an ageless Barbara Walters never started The View and is still making everyone cry in primetime.
But that’s not our lot in this life. On our lot, the news is a political pawn that Steve Bannon reengineered to drive us insane while Donald Trump repeatedly screamed “FAKE NEWS” on social media in a relentless bid to discredit journalists for a decade. The current situation at CBS News is the collapse that comes after the foundation is cracked beyond repair. I’ve been told that some of you get your news from me (HA!), so let’s catch up on what’s going on over there.
A couple of weeks ago, Bari Weiss, the Trump-chummy opinionista with no TV experience put in charge of CBS News, decided to reimagine 60 Minutes in her own vision. She fired leadership and two correspondents and then hired a new, completely inexperienced executive producer seemingly picked from a hat. Why? Because she could. Also, Donald Trump historically hates 60 Minutes and won’t stop calling for its demise. Don’t forget — Colbert got fired for a joke about the $16 million that Paramount, the company that owns CBS News, agreed to pay Trump over how a 60 Minutes piece was edited. Paramount is owned by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, the second richest person in America, and those two need Trump’s goodwill to get their Warner Bros. acquisition through. That means Trump finally has the leverage he needs to destroy the oldest and most-watched newsmagazine on TV, which he must do because it regularly contradicts his personal version of reality.
Why so many people willingly onboard themselves to his special reality is another topic for a different day. The rest of us are left to, like, take up Tai Chi so we don’t end up succumbing to road rage.
Anyhoo …
Last week, Scott Pelley — veteran CBS journalist, 60 Minutes correspondent, and this week’s most honorable recipient of a Distinction in Unhingement — lost his shit in a staff meeting and then was fired. His interview with The New York Times is worth reading/watching/listening to depending on which orifice you prefer ingesting your media through. He boldly spoke the truth, which I always support, but more than that, he brilliantly represented the drama queen community, and we need all the gravitas we can get.
The news actually exists to investigate and report on the kind of corruption that’s unfolding at CBS. Journalists, the serious ones, need institutional support and financial backing to make sure that the worst shit imaginable doesn’t go unchecked. There’s a lot of work to be done. But how can that work and its lack of funding compete with the holy trinity of media collapse: algorithms, AI, and Donald Trump?
That question desperately needs answering, too, but I’m the wrong woman for the job.
Before I quit TikTok, I quite regularly got my news from a poorly animated talking trout. If Anna Nicole Smith were alive today, she could have been my Diane Sawyer. I’m pouring one out.
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™
Liz
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“I’m loving the Instagram, Liz. I like looking at pictures.” — my mother
Judith, we all do.
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***
Everyone in Los Angeles with a working brain gets to unclench because we don’t have to spend the next five months hearing about this sociopath. Goddess is good!