Dylan Byers@DylanByers
One small state-of-the-culture observation on last night….
Shortly after leaving the Hilton, where a gunman attempted to enter the room in which the President, Vice President, several cabinet members, congressmen, dignitaries, business executives, and hundreds of America’s leading journalists were gathered, I went to a bar with a small group of colleagues to touch base, get our bearings, and, ideally, watch the news coverage.
When I lived in Washington a decade ago, bars like this one usually had at least one TV tuned to CNN or Fox News. These TVs were on a hockey game, and no one in the bar seemed aware of what had just taken place mere blocks away. We asked a bartender to change the channel to CNN so we could watch the president’s briefing with captions, which they did. But then, a few minutes later, the bartender said he’d been informed by the manager that the bar had a policy against showing political content, and he’d have to go back to sports.
I tried to imagine what this bar might have looked like on March 30, 1981, an hour or so after Hinckley fired shots at Reagan at the very same hotel. I imagine every television would have been on CNN or the wall-to-wall special coverage on the broadcast networks, and that passers by would have come in to watch, as well.
The media is giving this the ample coverage it deserves. But it’s unnerving how desensitized so many people have become—to shootings, obviously, but also to political violence and the abnormality of the moment.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe we just picked the wrong bar. But I doubt it. Pew Research recently reported that attention to news in the U.S. has declined across all age groups since 2016, and that young adults (ages 18 to 29) have consistently had the lowest levels. Even as the news itself intensifies—in politics, geopolitics, technology, etc—more and more people seem to be tuning it out.
And I suppose this is how you find yourself in a bar in the nation’s capital, an hour after crouching behind a chair as secret service members evacuate the President of the United States from the room, being told that you’ll have to watch Penguins vs. Flyers.
