Last week a viewer could watch the president give a speech on one half of the screen while on the other half a panel of news anchors explained what he was saying and why it was wrong.
NBC and ABC would not broadcast the speech live on their networks. They streamed it instead. This is not the first time networks have declined to broadcast a presidential speech. Some did the same for Biden and Obama.
There was a time, within living memory, when a journalist waited for a speech to end before telling the country what to think of it. The waiting was a small courtesy, but it rested on a large assumption: that the people watching could be trusted with the raw facts and come to their own conclusions. The split screen quietly withdraws that assumption.
This paternalism is nothing new. Walter Lippmann explained it a century ago in his book Public Opinion. The world, he argued, is too vast and too tangled for ordinary people, who see it only through crude pictures in their heads. So a trained class must organize what the public perceives, and manufacture its consent.
Lippmann was only cribbing Plato. Plato’s guardians governed the city by a noble lie — a useful myth, administered for everyone’s good. The split screen is not a lapse from journalistic principle. It is the core journalistic principle, the one the trade was actually built on, surfacing for a brief moment.
And Lippmann was not wrong about everything. No one reads the actuarial tables behind an insurance bill. No one audits the Fed on a lunch break. Every one of us takes nearly everything on trust, from some mediator. The question was never whether we would be shaped. The question is who does the shaping, and by what light.
Be generous toward Lippmann: he was a philosopher, or at least he fashioned himself one. He had read widely in history and philosophy and could write a decent argument. And he shared his ideas with the public, in books and columns. A man could disagree with Lippmann and know exactly what he was disagreeing with. But when the critic Edward Said surveyed Lippmann’s long career, Said saw America choosing in Lippmann “the style of reassuring authority over any concrete message or social vision.”
The modern pundit class is self-assured, but less reassuring. On social media, the thinking has grown thinner with each generation. A few news personalities have published books, though with ghostwriters at work it is hard to tell who has substance. The distance from Public Opinion to 2026 is vast. But in asking mass media of any age to make sense of the world, we may be asking too much.
News is a report of what is. And no quantity of is ever adds up to an ought. A man may know every fact about the world and still not know what he must do about any of them. The gulf is not crossed by more facts, better sourced. For most of human history it was crossed by revelation, and the crossing was kept by the church. The clerics could tell a people what the events of the world meant, because they had a Word from outside the world to measure them by.
Said writes that Lippmann’s career was not trahison des clercs — not the treason of the intellectuals. In reaching for that diagnosis, Said had the right crime and the wrong defendants.
Mass media could take the place it did because of treason by the clerics. The media did not storm the sensemaking chair. It found the chair empty and sat down, and it has held the office ever since without ordination. Christ had a brief comment on such arrangements: “if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
How did the chair come to be empty? Somewhere along the way, the gospel got trimmed down to a private transaction — a boarding pass off a sinking ship, redemption with no bearing on Monday morning. Pulpits learned to tell a man how to be saved but not how to live, and congregations stopped asking.
An unreformed people will be formed by programming. The need for oughts does not lapse just because the supply does. So the evening news obliges. Each event arrives pre-narrated as the most important thing in the world. It is chosen from an endless mass by editors who do not say, and are rarely asked, why they chose it.
Which returns us to Lippmann. In 1937 he published The Good Society, his blueprint for ordering the world justly.
That same year, Lippmann’s wife of 20 years divorced him, on grounds of “extreme cruelty, a violent, ungovernable temper.” This cleared the way for him to marry the woman he had been having an affair with, the wife of a close friend. Lippmann could draft a good society, but he could not manage a good household. That is not a scandal peculiar to Lippmann. It is the ordinary condition of blind guides, who are blind to their own blindness first.
The reformer’s instinct at this point is to imagine a better press — humbler, chastened, rigorous at last. But there is no press reform that survives contact with the humans who would staff it. The split screen is not an editorial policy that can be revised. It is pride, and pride is not fixed by better hiring. The media is fallen because humans are fallen, and the Lippmanns of the world will always volunteer to run the media — cheerfully, and with the best of intentions, which is rather the problem.
The remedy is not a better press but a smaller appetite for it. Think for yourself. The speech is here.
And take your oughts from the One who is not clay. On the other half of the screen, the speech goes on — muted, waiting for someone to decide the country can be trusted to listen.
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