Lewis Black’s rant about “maxxing” trends is a classic in his own unique style, but it’s also a helpful highlight reel of a deeply unhelpful phenomenon that’s been around since long before TikTok.
■ CNN started it: The 24-hour news cycle. Or, more properly, the 24-hour “news-like” cycle. A true “all-news” format had already been on the air for more than a decade, pioneered by 1010 WINS in New York in 1965. Other all-news radio stations followed, so CNN’s launch in 1980 wasn’t the birth of continuous news coverage -- just the birth of 24-hour “news” that didn’t repeat every 30 minutes.
■ In the end, it’s hard to assess it as an improvement. Only so much happens in a day -- the essential brand promise of all-news radio was and remains “You give us 22 minutes: We’ll give you the world”. It’s a promise of self-containment.
■ The only reason “news” packages give time and treatment to faddish nonsense like “maxxing” is because they’re trying to fill an infinite void. In the end, nobody ends up wiser for it. Nonsense gets platformed, time gets wasted, and people end up with lower opinions of other people because of it.
■ A typical issue of The Economist probably contains about 65,000 to 70,000 words. A very swift reader going at 500 words per minute would need more than two hours to read it cover-to-cover. And when done, that reader would know more about the world than if they had watched “news” on television for 24 hours a day for an entire week straight.
■ But even still, almost nobody reads The Economist cover-to-cover (even though it’s thoughtful, comprehensive, and edited to a fine polish) because there’s really only so much that anybody needs to know about current events. And we certainly don’t need to get swallowed up by hours upon hours of seductive filler masquerading as news.