Early in the pandemic my favored news source was Trevor Noah on The Daily Show. His lightning-quick insight and boyish energy are the perfect antidote to mounting fears. And his stable of comedian correspondents – particularly Dulcé Sloan – add high notes of anger and absurdity.

Then, as we moved into the 2020 election, I turned to Jake Tapper on CNN. A former White House journalist who’s known for being prepared, persistent, and a pain-in-the-neck, he has become the face of genteel outrage. He’s handsome, old enough to project anchorman gravitas and young enough to inspire daydreams. His resting face is a perpetual frown so magnificent that he seems, already, before he even opens his mouth, displeased. When he is very displeased he tilts his head to one side, squints, and holds it there for a few beats, as if trying to understand an abstract sculpture. His face alone expresses quiet outrage on behalf of an audience too tired to be outright outraged at a time when there are fresh sources of outrage every day.

The last time I watched the news this fervently was in 2007, when Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination. It was the talk on MSNBC that attracted me then, particularly the nerdy punditry from Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow, whose long-winded soliloquies vented curiosity, cynicism and joy. Each Friday Olbermann announced the The Worst Person in the World, shaming a notorious political figure from that week’s news cycle. It was an innocent time, when bad behavior was outstanding.

What does it say now that audiences – both conservative and liberal – turn to media for emotional assurance in addition to news? We’ve had four years of national political news so brazen and so base that it needs no commentary; it serves beautifully as its own satire. We already know the news, what we want is an icon.

How do we represent something too horrible to represent? When 27 people, 20 of them young children, were shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connectictut last month, many news outlets showed a photo of a police officer and a teacher leading a line of children to safety. Each child held her arms out around the shoulders of the child in front of her, as if it were some kind of playground game. There is fear on the children’s faces and one girl is shrieking. Yet the image doesn’t convey the extraordinary facts of the tragedy: that people are shooting at small children, and that twenty of them are dead. Except for a photo of the bloodshed, what could have conveyed that?

Six days later, after the victims' bodies had been identified and their families notified, The New York Times listed their names on the front page, in white letters, across a black field three-columns-wide and half-a-page high. Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC was unveiled in 1982, the act of listing victims’ names in memorial architecture has become standard practice, almost a design cliche. But the listing in the newspaper is especially powerful. It exploits the traditional broadsheet format: words on paper, black and white graphics, and the authoritative Times type face. The big black box, uncomfortably off-center, is severe. The italicized letters are stately, like those on a formal invitation, or a gravestone. Reading the list is wrenching. These children have the kind of enchanted first names (Chase, Grace, Aviella) we give children now, and last names (Irish, Italian, Chinese, hyphenated) that conjure something of their family life. Beside each victim's name the Times lists her age. All of the children were 6 or 7, and reading these numbers again and again is staggering. Even the ages of the adult victims, from 25 to 52, are irrationally young. The list capures a gravity and complexity that most photographs of the event just don’t.

January 23, 2013 by Nalina Moses