Author: Amy Koczera

Between the shutdown, AI, and global instability, our systems are speeding up while our capacity to adapt slows down.

Do you get your news from social media and want to stay informed, but without all the doomscrolling? Do you want to hear from all sides, but there isn’t one place that gives you everything you need?

Welcome to the Stories Behind the Soundbites: a series dedicated to unpacking the big picture trends shaping the week’s headlines from multiple perspectives. Each blog breaks down the headlines dominating your feeds, how they’re being spun from different sides, and what they really say about the world we’re building.

Politics: The shutdown and the governance crisis

The U.S. government shutdown entered its second week, furloughing over 750,000 federal workers and causing cascading effects in air travel, public services, and state funding. Meanwhile, Trump floated deploying the National Guard and invoked talk of the Insurrection Act, a move that some say turned a budget standoff into a clash over executive power.

Some outlets are framing the shutdown as a test of leadership and institutional resolve, while others have called it out as pure political leverage. Meanwhile, the general public is becoming more and more used to this kind of political dysfunction as just a regular part of daily life, raising greater concerns about the future of democracy. In addition, the White House Office of Management and Budget circulated a memo suggesting that furloughed workers may not be automatically entitled to back pay–signaling a sharp twist from past precedent.

The takeaway: Dysfunction has become the default.

The shutdown and surrounding coverage reveal how political gridlock is no longer a symptom of a country in crisis, it’s just the standard for how the system operates. Power struggles and performance have replaced regulators’ and politicians’ ability to problem-solve and have productive conversations across the aisle, trickling down into everyday life for Americans as the norm, leading to greater polarization.

Read the full blog on the Bite Back Substack.

The 2000s: Clickbait, bloggers, and the fall of the old news order

This piece is the third in a five-part series tracing the evolution of soundbite culture and how it’s shaped the way we consume information, debate ideas, and trust (or don’t trust) the media. Each decade tells a different part of the story. This series starts with the 1980s, when political campaigns, corporate advertising, and media consolidation collided to shrink our attention spans post-Cronkite era journalism. From there, I’ll look at the 1990s tabloid boom and reality-TV era, the rise of the internet in the 2000s, the weaponization of social media in the 2010s, and finally, the TikTok-brain algorithm-driven attention economy of today. Together, these chapters reveal not only how our media ecosystem has transformed, but how it’s changed our society and psychology at the same time.

Digital media and the Internet take over

The 1990s introduced spectacle as the organizing principle of modern media. By the early 2000s, the pace had gone into overdrive. With the machine of the 24-hour news cycle constantly churning in the background, cable networks filled every minute with wall-to-wall coverage, punctuated by punditry, speculation, and looping graphics designed to keep viewers agitated and engaged.

The real shift of the decade came with the Internet boom and the rise of digital outlets that could move faster and cheaper than newspapers or TV. Blogs and early online publications competed for our attention, pumping out a steady stream of fresh content everyday. Audiences came to expect real-time updates, and the stories dramatic enough to draw clicks often dictated what rose to the top of the mainstream news agenda.

While many new forces played a role in shaping the media landscape of the early 2000s, we have to start by talking about one unimaginable and tragic event that redefined the news cycle and set in motion years of coverage, reframing how global events were reported–especially by American media: September 11, 2001.

Read the full blog on the Bite Back Substack.