CNN and the Decline of Western Civilization
By Bob Hembree
Some nights, the blue glow of the television flickers against silent walls, casting restless shadows that stretch and shrink with each breaking headline. The first appearance of the CNN logo—red, relentless, a planet unto itself—marked a new epoch in the history of information. Outside, the world remains quiet, the moon’s reflection trembling on the surface of a rain barrel. Inside, anchors speak with the urgency of prophets, promising news not just at six or eleven, but forever—news unspooling like a river with no mouth, no delta, only the endless rush of water over stone.
I. The Invention of Perpetuity
There was a time before the cycle. News arrived in measured doses: the paper on the doorstep, the evening broadcast, the hush of Sunday mornings. Silence was possible, and thought could ferment in the gaps between bulletins. With the advent of the 24-hour news channel, a machine was born that devoured time and spat out fragments. The screen never slept; neither, it seemed, did its viewers.
Days once measured by sunlight and the slow drift of clouds became segmented by the crawl of headlines. The world, once a tapestry woven by hand, transformed into a mosaic of interruptions—each piece bright, urgent, and incomplete.
Gardens wilted in the summer heat, untended as attention shifted indoors. The air, once filled with the scent of soil and cut grass, became saturated with the static of breaking news. The voice of the television rose and fell like a tide, washing away the possibility of silence.
II. The Suffocation of Truth
It was not enough to report; the machine needed to feed. Stories repeated, refracted, stretched thin across hours. When nothing new happened, speculation filled the void—experts summoned like soothsayers, their words swirling in the studio air. Anchors’ voices grew louder, gestures sharper, as if volume and motion could conjure substance from absence.
On a certain evening, a hologram flickered beside the anchor’s desk: a correspondent, rendered spectral, reporting from a distant city. The effect was eerie, a ghost in the machine. The boundary between reality and illusion grew porous, the screen a membrane through which anything might pass.
Outside, the wind rattled the windows, carrying the scent of distant rain. The world itself seemed to grow thinner, stretched by the constant pull of attention, the need to fill every moment with noise.
III. The Twittering of the Birds
The dawn chorus of social media arrived—Twitter, a flock of digital birds, each with its own song. CNN, hungry for content, began to pluck tweets from the ether, weaving them into the fabric of the news. The authority of the anchor’s voice mingled with the chatter of strangers, the line between witness and participant dissolving in real time.
The first time a tweet appeared on the screen, its language raw and unfiltered, the change was unmistakable. Is this news now? The tomatoes on the counter glistened, red and real, while the words on the screen seemed weightless, untethered from context or consequence.
Outside, sparrows rustled in the hedge, their calls rising and falling in chaotic harmony, each note distinct yet part of a greater whole. The news, too, became a cacophony of voices—some wise, some foolish, all clamoring to be heard.
IV. The Collapse of the Gate
Once, there were gatekeepers—editors with red pencils, fact-checkers in dim offices, reporters who walked the streets with notebooks in hand. Their work was slow, deliberate, rooted in the soil of verification. Now, the gates stand open, the floodwaters rushing in. Truth becomes a matter of consensus, or worse, of popularity.
Even the most venerable papers, battered by accusations of “fake news,” struggle to stay afloat in the torrent. Anchors’ voices grow defensive, headlines shriller. In the garden, tomatoes split open after a heavy rain, their flesh exposed to air and insects. Too much, too fast.
V. The Archaeology of Meaning
Late at night, the house is silent at last. Moonlight pools on the floor, silver and cold. Memories surface: the first time the news felt endless, the moment the screen became a window with no glass, only the ceaseless flicker of images. Civilization’s decline is not a sudden collapse, but a slow erosion—a wearing away of the bedrock of trust and meaning.
Outside, the garden waits for morning. For all its noise, the world remains rooted in silence, in the slow turning of the earth. Perhaps the antidote to the suffocation of truth is not more news, but less—the patience to listen, to wait, to let the story ripen on the vine.
What has been lost slipped away in the flicker of a screen, the hush of a garden, the restless turning of a world that forgot how to be still.