Why it matters that history's most jaded generation delivers our news
Generally speaking, I’m a fan of Gen X.
As a late Millennial prone to interests beyond my years, Gen X’ers make up half my friend group and the entirety of my ex-boyfriend roster, all but two of whom I still really like.
I like Gen X’s wry humor and their discriminating eye. I like the way they call bullshit and have helped me know how to look out for myself. And I think they like me too, generally, and somewhere deep down appreciate my outbursts of wide-eyed enthusiasm and unbridled delight over things, even if their surface reaction is an Oh-my-God-you’re-so-Millennial eye roll.
Still, they are not the cheeriest bunch.
Which has got me thinking lately: is Gen X – and not the facts of reality itself – the reason everything seems so glum?
As a recap, Gen X is the latchkey generation or the middle child set. They’re the generation who gave us Kurt Cobain and the Rat Pack; the ones who made fashion of the disaffected scowl.
They’re mid-life now, hovering around 47.2, th age a recent Dartmouth study officially declared the low point of the human happiness frontier. And though they ought to be in charge of everything by now, or getting close to it, it’s looking more and more like they’ve got an incurable case of Prince Charles Syndrome, with Boomers refusing to die and most people rather having charismatic Millennials assume the throne when they do.
It’s not the only place they’ve gotten the short shrift: they’ve been too early or too late to really benefit from the system-wide changes over the last twenty years. As the last generation to graduate college without email, the digital age meant they had to relearn everything just as soon as they got going. Add to that September 11, which upended their careers just as they were settling in and the 08 financial crisis, which didn’t spark quite the same “maybe I should go find something more meaningful” liberation as it did Millennials, given they’d just signed mortgages and had two kids.
One area where Gen X has really thrived, however, is news media.
Matt Drudge is Gen X, as is Alex Jones. Tucker Carlson, Rachel Maddow, Megyn Kelly and Shepherd Smith are, too. Shane Smith, who started VICE and Nick Denton, of Gawker-founding fame both make the cut, and New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is, at 46, edging in on her pessimistic prime. If you’re an NPR listener, you wake up to Gen X’ers every morning on “Up First,” but if you’re Alt-Right, don’t worry: Andrew Breitbart’s Gen X, too.
In fact, while Boomers invented the 24-hour news and Millennials created social media that worked, one could make the case that it’s Gen X who’s really made these platforms what they are.
Which makes it seem worthwhile to consider the extent to which their worldview shapes the tone of our news, and might be the reason listening to it makes you feel about like you did after finishing Less Than Zero.
In my own news media consumption, I’ve identified four subcategories of Gen X journaists:
1. The Cool Kids: reporters like Shepherd Smith and Megyn Kelly who are hot, humorless, airtight in their conviction and look at you through the camera like if you dare to disagree with them you are a loser and you are done.
2. The Hero-Critics: pundits like Rachel Maddow who seem like the type to role-play fantasy debates with William F. Buckley in the bathroom mirror, and take no greater delight in spotting an act of hypocrisy or idiocy they can, with flawless articulation, skewer.
3. The No-Good Progressives: Rporters like Sabrina Tavernise or Rachel Martin who take pride in talking about progress, but don’t actually believe it’s possible, such that they’re stories all go: and then it seemed good, and you might think it’s great but then THIS and so it’s all so, so, so bad!
4. The Awkward Empath.This is what happens when Gen X’ers decide to tell good news and it comes out either like Wednesday Martin trying to smile in that Barry Sonnenfeld movie, or like a grown adult suddenly discovering they’ve got a leg and deciding to try to walk. Which would be enjoyable to wtiness, were it not for the way most of these journalists act like they’re the first ones to discover smiling/walking/looking at the good without acknowledging that the rest of us have been doing it for a long time.
In the frist two cases, the general tone is: People Suck. Everything Sucks. I’m the only who really sees it; you’re an idiot if you don’t see it too.
In the latter two, it’s a slightly softer: People are awful. Everything is awful. I’ve bravely waded out into it so you can understand just how awful it all is; you don’t have to thank me, but you can please subscribe.
(Is that all too harsh? Sorry…that might all be a little too harsh. But you know what I mean).
Anyway. This hopeless tone is most noticeable when you compare it to the tone of the Millennial journalists now coming into their own.
Compare the New York Times podcast “The Daily” when millennial Kevin Roose hosts it versus Susan Tavernise. Or try Marine Powers on Washington Post’s “Post Reports” compared to her fellow liberal Gen X hosts on NPR’s “Up First.”
On the pundit front, millennial Ezra Klein might have his own issues, but he’ll leave you feeling decidedly more hopeful than Maddow ever will. And, love ‘em or hate ‘em, the Young Turks are welcoming and fun compared to their too-cool-for-school Gen X ebel predecessors at VICE.
Even the make-finance-fun genre is less aggravated when offered by the Millenials of (albeit sponsored) “Snacks Daily” compared to “Make me Smart”’s trying-to-be-fun-but-always-still-really-bothered Molly Wood. And when it comes to political reporting, millennial Allison Michaels on “Can He Do That?” manages genuinely neutral inquisitiveness to Dierdre Walsh’s ever-present miff.
Obviously, there are exceptions to all of this, but by and large, there is a real difference, which I would boil down to the fundamental question: do you believe there is hope for a better future, or that we are in an unavoidable state of decline?
There are certain Gen X’ers who will read that and roll their eyes, following it up with some comment about how Millennials are naïve and spoiled and entitled.
And I’ll own that, when we were in our twenties, that wasn’t an unfair critique. But it was youth, not innate incapability.
What is so impressive to me about reporters like Roose and Powers (and also Ryan Knudson of the WSJ) is their capacity to hold intelligence and empathy; to be inquisitive without setting themselves in opposition; to speak with a calm confidence that seems to understand there is a lot of bad out there, but also that there might be a way to figre it out.
To be clear, I’m not saying there isn’t a lot that’s awful in the world, I just think there’s always been a lot that’s awful in the world, as well as a lot that’s good in the world, as there still is.
While I think it’s interesting, I also don’t think that the widespread fear and anger our population now faces is the result of brains not yet evolved to deal with the amount of information we’re getting. If that information were delivered in a calmer and more understanding tone, I think we’d be more alright.
And to the point that the negative is what consumers want, I think that data needs more parsing. That most people tune in because it’s what’s there, and that what really drives it are Gen X’ers on either side who find it fun and somewhat nostalgic. Like being teenagers again, except now, instead of sitting alone watching TV and ranting about how much the world sucks in their journals, they sit at home watching video clips on the computer and ranting about it on their Facebook walls.
And even THAT isn’t to say Gen X is bad or wrong or that their perspective is invalid. Nor that Millennials are better people or haven’t got a host of issues and irritants of our own.
I just think it’s kind of like that Jain parable of the three blind men and the elephant, in which, asked to describe the nature of the elephant, three blind men go up and touch it and describe it totally differently, depending whether they touched the tail or the hide or the trunk.
Gen X isn’t wrong in their view of things, they just don’t seem to realize they’re looking at through the ass.
From where I stand, clinging, I think, to the toenail and looking back up in desperate hope I won’t get crushed, it doesn’t seem like we’re in a state of rapid and inescapable decline. Rather, it strikes me that history has always been a repeating cycle of Build-Grow-Destroy-[intergrate what you learned and] Rebuild.
That, in that context, Boomers did an amazing job at their role of growing things, and Gen X has nailed their job of tearing it down. And isn’t it crazy how well it all works, that all that change-the-world / you-can-do-anything stuff with which Millennials have been inculcated has prepared them perfectly for their Rebuild it role, too?
Maybe it’s just me, but that chapter can’t get here soon enough.