For close to 40 years I wrote for broadcast journalism, which is a lot different than writing for “print.”

You don’t believe me, and I understand why. Words are words. How different can it be?

You’d be surprised. Writing for print involves the eyes. You, the reader, can control the reading speed. You can reread anything you missed. But your ears approach words differently. Ears instinctively enjoy rhythm, simplicity and short sentences — sort of like your favorite country song.

Consider the following sentence, written for print: “For the second week in a row, local farmers had to delay planting due to a slow-moving low-pressure system that continues to drop heavy rain on the area, making fields impassable, and causing potential future problems if the resulting late harvests are damaged by early frosts.”

That’s not a bad sentence. But here’s how it would be translated from print to broadcast:

“Local farmers facing big problems tonight. Rain, lots of it, keeping tractors out of the field. The result? Potentially poor harvests in fall when the first frost arrives. A season’s hopes and dreams running down the rain gutter.”

It looks ridiculous there on the page, doesn’t it? But read it out loud. Force your ears to listen to it. Right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

For the ear, it sings. But look closer. The verbs are all screwy; active-voice present-tense, even though we’re mostly talking about the future. And, as you probably noticed, the broadcast version doesn’t contain a single complete sentence.

But who cares? It’s zippy. Scary, and zippy. Disaster delivered with spice. You feel the smallest twinge of “oh those poor people,” but then it’s gone because we’re already on to the next story. “Now, on the brighter side, here’s new video of five kittens playing with a ball of string. And Boomer’s up next with sports.”

It was a living. And I’m not saying that writing for the ear is morally reprehensible. Responsible, highly trained broadcast journalists (as opposed to opinionated anchor/ranters) exist and are serving the public every day.

And so are the print journalists — what’s left of them. Sure, you’re reading this column, but people like you are the minority, and you know it.

And you also know why it’s happening. Today most people wonder why they should go to all the trouble of reading, and forming word-pictures and new ideas in their mind, when instead they can just let it all wash over them on television or social media like a bucket of water poured on a sidewalk that runs instantly into the gutter.

Maybe they don’t use those precise words, but the result is the same.

Print encourages pondering. Pondering stretches both the brain and the soul. It is, however, a dying art.

Personally, I think that when a nation loses the cultural ability to ponder it’s in deep trouble. If you don’t take time to question any of the hogwash washing over you — even when it’s coming from the team you agree with — then you’re just becoming a pre-programmed robot, predictably spouting simplistic zippy phrases that sizzle on the tongue but don’t hold up to even thirty-seconds of careful thought.

Sure, you can take comfort from knowing you’re not alone in the echo chamber. Knowing that you’re just one of 10 million other meme-forwarding couch potato culture warriors equally dedicated to the proposition that Red Good/Blue Bad (or vice-versa), might actually convince you that solving our national problems really is as simple as chanting “My body, my choice,” or “Save the Baby Humans,” really, really loudly. But it isn’t.

In 1964, Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message.” At the time, almost no one, myself included, had any idea what he meant. Today, it finally makes sense. When the broadcast and visual-driven media — television, radio, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. — controls, with our permission, the lion’s share of how we communicate with each other, then the ability to understand nuance, subtlety and depth are literally becoming lost arts — like cursive, spelling, reading a long book or even reading an analog clock.

So are you and I winning the good fight by gathering here every Sunday? It’s hard to say. But at least we’re fighting the battle.

Chris Huston is an author and award-winning columnist living in southern Idaho. Connect with Chris on both Facebook and Instagram at Chris Huston-Finding My Way and at chrishustonauthor.com.