The News

In a few years, G-d willing, I’ll be telling my grandchildren about something called "the news."

“The news,” I’ll say in that rambling, affectionate way grandfathers do, “was once gathered and delivered by skilled professionals called 'journalists'—people trained to separate what mattered from what didn’t.” I’ll compare them to miners extracting gold from the dross, or farmers sifting wheat from the chaff, the way people used to back in the olden days. And I’ll explain what “dross” and “chaff” mean.

“But how could those—what did you call them? Journalists?—how could they know what was important to you?” my granddaughter will ask.

And by you, she’ll mean me personally. Because she will have grown up in a world where “important” is whatever pleases her in the moment, served up by a perfectly calibrated personal feed. The idea that other people once chose what everyone needed to know will strike her as bizarre—as archaic as people tapping out telegrams in Morse Code.

I’ll try to explain that some events were important to everyone, or at least to most of us. She’ll look unconvinced.

And I’ll be thinking about the time when we arranged our evenings around the 6 PM or 10 PM broadcast. A time when the morning paper on the doorstep was more than information, it was a unifying force, curating not only facts but shared priorities. It told us not just what happened, but what mattered. It helped shape our sense of place—our community, our country, and the wider world. It offered a kind of moral framework, because we were all drinking from the same fountain, imagining ourselves as part of the same story.

How do I explain such a thing to a child whose world is a constellation of self-contained narratives, each one tuned to the desires and impulses of a single person?

Maybe I’ll bring it down to something she knows.

I’ll ask her whether someone who only tells you what you want to hear is a real friend. Or whether a true friend is someone who tells you the truth—even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it’s something you’d rather not hear. If someone only ever tells you what pleases you, I’ll say, they don’t really care about you. They care about being liked.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, I’ll realize that this is exactly what our technology has been doing to us. Not empowering us, like other inventions. It's doing the opposite. Disempowering us. Infantilizing us. Turning us into children—which might explain why so much of public discourse sounds like the schoolyard.

I won’t say that part to my granddaughter. But I suspect she’ll understand anyway. After all, we’re all at her level now.