The Infotainment Disaster Cable TV Made Possible
And why have only our own maturity to protect us from poorly conceived infotainment.
We’ve all done it - barfed up an impulsive opinion about something we don’t know that much about. Usually, this embarrassing behavior occurs at home in front of a limited live audience, mainly composed of pets. They weren’t listening, don’t worry.
Something triggered us. A politician’s soundbite. A TV character’s punchline. It doesn’t matter the source.
Before internet-enabled social media and apps like Substack, though, these fairly worthless thoughts and opinions evaporated quickly; they were not recorded. And they certainly didn’t spread. Dumb opinions tended to have no reach unless you owned a newspaper.
A lot of our worst opinions as human adults erupt quickly as we encounter ‘facts’ or ‘data’ that trigger some eruption of fear or laughter. We rashly apply some context to a stray comment or fact, and off we go.
It’s hard for Gen Z to imagine a society where random opining did not spread quickly to 10-25 people in your offline social network because of what you typed into your online device. Oops.
From Professional News to Infotainment
It’s not trivial when a podcaster or podcast guest catches a stray fact, such as the percentage of women in the military, and then interprets spastically this as a problem for military readiness. Huh?
How do you know this?
And who let this idiot in front of the mike?
Without context, research, and deep experience, a flippant opinion about a specialized domain has one basic source every journalist and academic learns about early in their training: flawed assumptions. And those flawed assumptions generally have two social sources in my experience: transmitted ideology or folk misunderstanding (i.e., stereotyping).
Before the advent of internet-enabled mobile devices, most thoughts based on flawed assumptions spread the farthest primarily via offline channels, undercutting the producer of the stupid comment as the comment spread, effectively neutering its power. This is village ‘censorship’ at its best. Bottom-up. Not from the top down.
“Oh, Sam is always saying stupid shit about economics. No one listens to him.”
In this long-gone world, the village idiot did not influence anyone beyond the village, so to speak. He could not magically find 1,257 like-minded village idiots from around the globe to applaud his inappropriate or inane comments. Gate-keeping of whose thoughts got broadcast was much stronger than today.
Today, the only thing that limits your ability to achieve reach beyond the village is the blandness of your content. Neither village gossip nor platform moderation does anything to stop the forward movement of extremely marginal thoughts and opinions that used to require pamphleteering, real face time, or the mail to spread slowly. While most self-published authors and podcasters fail to generate any reach beyond family and friends, thousands do succeed along a continuum, each step of which would not be possible without the internet. My business book is one such example.
It is easier than before the internet, but not at all easy, to generate reach at the level of thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands. The latter is just under the reach of low-level broadcast networks operating in specific regions and the most popular podcasts. Information is being broadcast constantly through a much larger number of pipes than in the 1970s, when I was born.
What we often forget is that we used to consume ‘news’ or ‘learn new information’ in highly discrete ritual moments (e.g., class, newspapers, or the evening news). The most popular ritual was reading a newspaper. It is a dirty physical object that requires both hands and mental focus to hold and peruse. You may skim articles, yes, but not compulsively like a newsfeed. In the early decades of newspapers, the illiterate would gather for readings. A great cinematic depiction of this behavior can be found in News of the World, starring Tom Hanks.
Acquiring knowledge in the modern, internet-enabled world has now become a form of hyper-casual, deritualized entertainment. We consume news out of boredom, not a pent-up, conscious desire for serious news. We watch DIY home renovation shows for fun, not to mimic techniques and execute them. When we view content like this, there is no preparation. No training. No ritual required. We gorge on information like candy. We consume “news channels” that are now primarily a series of op-ed talk shows, all day long.
The broadcaster controls the ‘pipe’ to its audience. The broadcaster, therefore, shoulders the responsibility for vetting content, excluding low-quality content, and ensuring that the context is sufficient for lay understanding or the understanding of its least well-educated viewers or listeners. The broadcaster must ensure that their channels are not simply propaganda machines. Or do they?
With highly concentrated media outlets prior to the Internet and Cable TV, this vetting process worked pretty well. Yes, this gatekeeping had an elitist function, but primarily insofar as someone needs to be the responsible adult thinking of the broader community.
With the advent of cable TV, however, this all started to break down. Irresponsible content began to spread on right-wing Christian televangelist channels and elsewhere. Pat Buchanan pretending to stop hurricanes with live, intercessory prayer? This was egotism masquerading as Christianity to most Christians.
However, the real problem with cable was the proliferation of 24/7 news channels. This led to a desperate need for ‘content’ to fill slots and shows. Inevitably, this devolved into a competitive infotainment model under the guise of ‘news.’ While the major broadcasters (NBC, ABC, and CBS) continued with their daily news shows in limited time slots, the cable news channels began to serve up infotainment and opinionated commentary.
As these channels chased ratings and ad monies, the temptation grew to sensationalize anything the executives would allow. The Rodney King riots and the O.J. Simpson trial became the first multi-week, 24/7 infotainment binges that would soon define how Americans thought about ‘news.’
News as infotainment. Gorging on news like you might gorge on beer.
The idea that consuming news about the world would devolve into toilet newsfeed scrolling seems funny at first until we think about what it means to be so casual in our approach to information acquisition.
Ironically, certain aspects of journalism have undergone significant improvements since the advent of cable TV news channels. Investigative journalism, although still a niche, has seen its creators become more proficient in demographics, social science, and overall research methods that journalists or newsfeed content creators do not commonly use.
However, today, only the motivated few will consciously select those more serious, well-researched sources. We aren’t forced to consume serious, carefully investigated news through the logic of editorial gatekeeping and media concentration in a tiny, committed professional tribe. Or just ignore the news if we’re indifferent. Those days are over.
We are bombarded with low-quality infotainment on multiple screens throughout the day.
Try ‘avoiding’ news-like content for a week. It won’t be easy.
Why Context Matters When We Consume News - Illegal Immigration
One topic that illustrates the damage done by decentralizing media into a thousand pundit-driven pipes focused on the most dramatic and controversial ‘angle’ is the federal tragedy of mass illegal immigration.
The large number of illegal immigrants living in the United States is not a fact many debate. I have yet to encounter anyone who believes the whole phenomenon is fabricated. Roughly 10.9M to 12.8M unauthorized immigrants live in the country right now (some are asylum seekers generating much of the current political firestorm).1 It is not easy to nail down the precise number of illegal immigrants living here, because this is a stigmatized identity that most will work hard to conceal even from Census takers (at all costs).
NOTE: When I say “illegal,” it’s important to note that this is a civil offense under U.S. law. Being ‘illegal’ is not a felony like murder, and having a pending asylum claim should neutralize any illegal status per federal law.
Until Trump’s first campaign in 2016, most of the media chatter about illegal immigration focused on how to treat illegal immigrants along a continuum of mass amnesty to aggressive deportation.
When border encounters surged after the pandemic, the media became more or less obsessed with the dramatic visual of ‘hungry hordes’ at the border, families crossing the desert filmed by drones. Large crowds did form at entry ports in El Paso and elsewhere, providing confirmation that our collective obsession was warranted, somewhat. In turn, we witnessed intense debates about border control as if the primary cause of illegal immigration is illegal border crossing at U.S. ports of entry.
I have yet to encounter a single, widely disseminated investigative piece that examines all known causes of illegal immigration and cites the available data on the phenomenon. And I read pretty obsessively.
Instead, this data and discussion have remained within policy institute blogs, congressional testimony, and Homeland Security reports. While the context has remained under-discussed and under-broadcast, a highly skewed discussion of causes for illegal immigration remains dominant everywhere. For example, this chart shows how the population of migrants without legal status surged after the pandemic, in large part because the Biden administration favored a humanitarian policy of releasing migrants with valid asylum or immigration claims to pursue legal status in the courts (rather than wait at the Mexico border or elsewhere).2
The framing of the problem as purely a ‘border control’ issue is, however, incredibly misleading and buries a long-term problem that most likely contributes to the simple majority of current illegal immigrants in the country.
Let me share what a little digging could reveal to a broader audience, if news channels did not focus primarily on infotainment as the primary filter for ‘news.’
Discovery #1 - Illegal immigration mainly accelerated in the 1990s.
Even with the post-pandemic surge in internal asylum releases, we do not appear to have exceeded the illegal immigrant peak right before the 2008 recession.
What happened in the 1990s?
Discovery #2 - Visa Overstays Are A Substantial Cause of Illegal Immigration
The United States has one of the most active borders in the world, as it is the second-largest economy globally and is heavily dependent on cross-border ground transport for the functioning of its economy.
The chart above from Customs and Border Protection indicates the total annual number of individuals who crossed into the United States legally. As you can see, we experience a yearly influx of people that is slightly over half of the entire U.S. population (maybe this is why our roads are so bad?). Most of these individuals are tourists, businesspeople, and commercial truck drivers staying for a matter of days or weeks at most.
In 2023, federal visa data on nonimmigrants (those without legal resident status, green cards, asylum, pending asylum cases, etc.) suggested that 39,005,712 non-immigrants were expected to depart the country in 2023. Approximately 39 million legal visitors held visas that were set to expire in 2023, including many short-term visitors who were expected to leave in a matter of days or weeks.3
“Of this number, CBP calculated a total overstay rate of 1.45 percent, or 565,155 overstay events. In other words, 98.55 percent of the in-scope nonimmigrant visitors departed the United States on-time and in accordance with the terms of their admission.”4
This appears to be a great track record until you perform some simple math.
If the 2023 rate has been occurring since roughly 2000 (when illegal immigration peaked before the pandemic), then we would see the accumulation of nearly 8 million illegal residents.
1.11 % overstay
35 million expected annual departures
= 7.7 million adults who overstayed their visas could accumulate if they all stayed indefinitely.
In fact, given the opportunities in our economy and the intense sacredness we place on individual privacy, this is an excellent, working assumption, despite lacking complex data to confirm it.
The lack of a nationwide exit system has made direct, complete measurement of overstays challenging. U.S. transportation hubs and ports of entry were not constructed with exit processing in mind. Given the historical lack of a comprehensive exit-tracking system, the U.S. government and nongovernmental researchers have used estimation techniques over the years to study the number and characteristics of the overstay population.5
What percentage of overstays ever get discovered? We do not know. The government focuses on estimating those who do not leave, not tracking them down. I highly suspect they have little idea where most of these people live after 1-2 years into their visa overstay.
I looked and looked and even delayed publishing this essay as I looked for any federal, cumulative estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the country today who are likely to be visa overstays. No such rolling, cumulative estimate exists, nor does the law require it. All I could find are rough Congressional estimates in 1996 (41%)6 and 2014 (31-57%).7
While the current administration is pursuing those with court hearings and other easy-to-find illegals, there is still no discussion of the millions of people who have lived here for years (or even decades) without legal status because they overstayed a visa.
Why?
“Visa overstay” is not a phenomenon conducive to infotainment or simple analytics. It is not conducive to dramatic drone footage either, since the individuals work quietly among us. It is not tangible like the midnight border crossing family.
When I was a junior at Harvard in the early 1990s, my Nepali roommate informed me one day that the managers of a bustling Harvard Square fast-food joint were college visa overstays from Nepal. And he also had several other related tales of overstays.
Instead of discussing this significant, long-term ‘cause’, everyone focuses on border release policies as the primary cause. Yet, visa overstays continue to occur every year, quietly, out of sight and out of mind. This is how our modern infotainment complex approaches very sensitive topics, letting the “news” skew to the juiciest controversy, to the most cinematic angle possible without doing basic research on government websites to provide a balanced picture.
Sources: low estimate - https://cmsny.org/correcting-record-false-misleading-statements-on-immigration/ and high estimate: https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/the_cost_of_illegal_immigration_to_taxpayers.pdf
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-immigration-legacy
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/24_1011_CBP-Entry-Exit-Overstay-Report-FY23-Data.pdf#:~:text=The%20FY%202023%20non%2DVWP%20total%20overstay%20rate,3.04%20percent%20of%20the%20non%2DVWP%20expected%20departures.&text=The%20total%20overstay%20rate%20is%203.5%20percent,3.91%20percent%20for%20the%20J%20visa%20category.
Since this is a mathematical estimate, not a direct measurement, it was revised in May 2024 by a slight amount; 98.98% departed as scheduled.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47848
https://tracreports.org/tracker/dynadata/2014_05/RS22446.pdf
https://tracreports.org/tracker/dynadata/2014_05/RS22446.pdf
You and one other Substack writer, Noah Smith have done a real service in covering this topic. I have been try to wrap my head around who and how this immigration situation came to be. And your post is another piece of the puzzle. Thank-you!!