THE MAGIC BOX

3/29/2023

If you tune into the evening news on a network like CBS or NBC, you’ll notice that the anchors speak in a particular dialect. It’s somewhat nasal, with an artificial cadence meant to command authority and lend credibility to words being read from a teleprompter.

Whenever I do accidentally find myself watching TV news, the Anchor Dialect strikes me as outdated, from another era. But anything that seems dusty and outmoded today once seemed fresh and plausible. The Anchor Dialect is no exception—at one point it made perfect sense that someone on TV would speak so artificially. Not only did it make sense to broadcasters, but also to the audience.

If you spend a moment thinking about why audiences didn't mind being talked to this way, you realize it’s because there was an unspoken understanding that people on television are special, almost god-like. They have more wisdom, good looks, and status then lowly civilians who don’t appear on screen. The thinking went: of course they should speak differently, they are of a fundamentally different class.

But what’s happened over the past several years is that the public has slowly realized that this is a great myth—that people on television are nothing special. When someone can broadcast a show from their garage on the internet that is more interesting than what’s being offered by the mainstream, suddenly the dialect of our TV overlords seems like pure plastic. 

What's happened is similar to the Reformation. The Catholic church’s long-standing authority and status came under fire, in part due to changes in technology. Just as the clergy was questioned by the masses and accused of being impure and corrupt, so now the priests of modern media are being questioned. 

Indeed, mass media has been the American religion for the better part of a century, but now a great schism is occurring, and the old priestly manner of spreading the truth is falling on increasingly deaf ears. The Magic Box is flickering, losing its luster.

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