'Surface-Level' is a Breath of Fresh Air to the Drowned
2020 shuttered newsrooms, it sent work home for the safety of a nation. We’ve since thrown everyone back out there, but during that strange, terrible year was an interesting problem for mainstream production. Centralized recording studios are biohazards, but also where the bulk of investment goes. Once without that basket and all its lovely eggs: webcams, laptops, and cell phones became the tools of the trade for reporters, calling in remotely to discuss a story from their rambunctious households.
For a while, cable news looked like 2015-era Twitch livestreams with a graphics budget. The visuals wrapped around the footage, chryons and B-roll, made for a confused aesthetic. Yet those of us who already invested in high quality webcams and at-home microphones were prepared, not from any precognition, but a lack of reliance on production studios to handle equipment.
As the years passed and remote reporting became sparse yet more professional, the news started to look like “the news” again. Yet still online, in social media spaces these networks quickly pivoted to, creators hold clout far above any anchor.
TikTok's a fine example of this, though certainly not the only.
Production value is a factor which can skew either way for viewers, but in a feed of associated content, this correlation means nothing for the underlying content. A hypothetical viewer might watch a video on a topic that interests them filmed from selfie perspective, with poppy on-screen text, and find themselves hooked for things unrelated to these factors. Yet they still play a role in choosing which piece of media to next partake in, from both the consumer and the serving algorithm. 
If a viewer likes videos of people doing their makeup while talking about their opinions on healthcare, it might not take long for videos of other people doing much the same about broader or fringe topics, in much the same style, are queued up. The aesthetic grippings flatten other possible implications of incompetence that grifters with no production resources would find themselves with.
It’s hard to get a production crew if you’re such a toxic person that you drive away everyone you work with. But being toxic alone, platformed by algorithm, launders the poison into just another filmed-from-home cell phone video, which looks more or less indistinguishable from an expert who simply didn’t bother their resources for such a simple video.
Streamlined editing tools allow anyone to make their videos look good, convincing even. Anyone. Certain online circles even see lack of qualification as itself trustworthy, that by being a layman, by being someone outside of the system, you can see the system for its whole.
Yet it’s easy to understand a car, by simple terms, just looking at it. Metal, rubber, plastic- it drives as I give it power and fuel. Were one to open the hood, to pull out the engine and then apply their same overview logic there, the wording would not change. Metal, rubber, plastic, power, fuel.
These are not incorrect observations, but do little to educate anyone beyond simple chemical composition. It’s not a requirement for a presenter to have a degree in each and every subject; they’re a lens for their audience of laymen, and should approach subject matter with that in mind.
Is, however, having a surface-level understanding of many complicated topics any more useful than an average person absorbing headlines? Is personality really adding value here, or is it obfuscating lack of true understanding?