Hello gang. Claire and I have been on a re-watching-old-movies kick lately. Last night it was Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s dark satire of the news business. I don’t know the last time I saw it but I’m pretty sure it was on a VHS cassette.

Time has only made the movie more disturbing and prescient. I don’t want to give away the plot, because if you haven’t seen it you should (it’s on Netflix). But in short it’s about a television network that boosts ratings by taking advantage of frustration and psychosis—individual and collective—to turn news into entertainment.

What’s stunning and revealing is that this movie came out in 1976. Ted Turner was still four years away from debuting CNN out of a former country club in Atlanta. A few years earlier, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman (later known as Lompoc (Calif.) Federal Penitentiary Inmate 01489463(B)), had passed a memo titled “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News” to a lecherous young media consultant named Roger Ailes. It would…