Dispatches from the Heartland

Down with Group Chat

by John Herlihy

There was a time when the news delivered facts, not feelings; reporting, not reactions; clarity, not cacophony. Today, however, the airwaves are crowded with group chats, news panels, and those inscrutable talking heads who fill the empty spaces at the table. Whatever happened to factual neutrality? When did journalism decide that the public needed to hear every Tom, Dick, Dolores and Harriet’s opinion on the politicians or the day’s events?

Somewhere in the upper floors of media management, a decision was made—without consulting the viewers—that the public craved commentary. Not reporting, not investigation, not sober analysis, but commentary: rigid, inflexible, and often delivered at high volume. The talking heads discuss the issues as if they were throwing mud at each other. To make matters worse, they all talk heatedly at the same time, precluding any possibility of understanding what they are actually saying. Perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise.

One morning, while eating breakfast before work, I turned on a news program hoping to get my finger on the pulse of the day’s headlines. Instead, I found myself trapped in yet another group chat. The anchor joyfully announced their return after the ad break, as if this were the highlight of the hour. And then, in the final segment, the anchor asked each member of the four‑person panel what they were “talking about” in their own group chats.

A group chat within a group chat—a maze I never wanted to go down in the first place.

How We Got Here

This didn’t happen overnight. It began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when cable news discovered that conflict sells. A single anchor reading the news was no longer “engaging.” Producers wanted sparks, friction, personalities. They wanted viewers to stay through the commercial break, and nothing keeps people glued to the screen like a good argument.

Then came the era of 24‑hour news cycles, which created a new problem: too much time, not enough news. The solution? Fill the empty hours with commentary. If there wasn’t enough news to report, they would simply talk about the news that might happen, or the news that could happen, or the news that someone thinks might happen.

Next came social media, which taught newsrooms that audiences respond to opinion, emotion, and outrage more than they respond to facts. Twitter rewarded hot takes. Facebook rewarded anger. YouTube rewarded personalities. And cable news followed suit. The result is what we have today: Panels instead of reporting, opinions instead of facts, personalities instead of journalists, group chats instead of news. The news became a performance, a theater of argument, a place where people talk over each other not to communicate but to dominate. And somewhere along the way, the quiet dignity of factual reporting—the anchor who simply told you what happened—disappeared.

Why It Matters

The tragedy is not just that the news has become noisy. It’s that the noise has replaced the signals of factual reporting. We are drowning in commentary and starving for clarity. We are listening to people talk about talking, instead of listening to people talk about facts. The public never asked for this. The public never voted for this. The public never said, “Please give us more opinions.” But the media decided that opinions were cheaper than reporting, easier than investigation, and more profitable than truth. So here we are—trapped in a group chat we never joined.