The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

What Fox realized on election night in 2000 (when its ratings spiked upward) and what MSNBC came to accept a few years later was something increasingly visible throughout the nineties, but too journalistically depressing to openly embrace: People watch cable news as a form of entertainment, and they don’t want to learn anything that contradicts what they already believe.

What they want is information that confirms their preexisting biases, falsely presented through the structure of traditional broadcasting. It had to look like objective journalism, but only if the volume was muted. Moreover, the bias expressed cannot be subtle or unpredictable; partisan audiences want to know what they’re getting before they actually get it. Unless cataclysmic events are actively breaking, the purpose of cable news is emotional reassurance.

What much of the public had considered a milquetoast competition between uncharismatic clones was understood by the court as a straightforward war for control of the future. Every other aspect of political thought became irrelevant—the conservatives had a one-judge majority, and that was enough to decide who ran the world. Why pretend like this was even a question to interrogate? They made the call, everyone knew why the call was made, and there was no going back. On the biggest possible stage, it was established that every sociopolitical act of the twenty-first century would now be a numbers game on a binary spectrum. My undefined, uncommitted Gen X worldview was instantaneously worthless. That was over. Now there were only two sides to everything.