Greg Tolvanen holding up the 2017 CNN clip on his phone in the living room of his Clintonville home on Wednesday evening. He asked the photographer to listen closely for the gasp. Credit: Marcus Engel/The New York Time5
Greg Tolvanen holding up the 2017 CNN clip on his phone in the living room of his Clintonville home on Wednesday evening. He asked the photographer to listen closely for the gasp. Credit: Marcus Engel/The New York Time5

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The algorithm surfaced it on a Tuesday night while Greg Tolvanen was doing the dishes. It appeared in the suggested clips beneath a video about ductwork insulation — a nine-year-old CNN segment, slightly degraded by compression, in which the anchor Anderson Cooper tells political commentator Jeffrey Lord that if the president of the United States “took a dump on his desk, you would defend it.” Mr. Tolvanen set down the sponge. He watched the clip once, then again, and then a third time, slowly, with the care one might bring to a photograph of a grandparent’s kitchen.

“I remember exactly where I was when that aired,” Mr. Tolvanen said, standing in the living room of his three-bedroom colonial in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus, where he has lived for eleven years. He is 44. He sells commercial HVAC ductwork on a regional basis. He does not consider himself a political person. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s it. That’s the most insane thing that will ever be said on live television.’ I was so sure about that.” He paused. “I was so completely sure.”

The clip, which originally aired on May 10, 2017, during a panel discussion about the firing of F.B.I. Director James B. Comey, generated significant reaction at the time. CNN issued no formal apology. Mr. Cooper did not retract the statement. Mr. Lord, for his part, did not appear to disagree with the premise so much as the framing. The segment moved on. The news cycle moved on. The year 2017 moved on to other things that also seemed, at the time, like the worst things that had ever happened.

Mr. Tolvanen has now watched the clip fourteen times in the past month.

“It’s not about the politics,” he said, settling into the brown leather recliner that he described, with what appeared to be genuine emotion, as “the only thing in this house that’s truly mine.” He pulled up the clip on his phone and held it toward a visitor. “Listen. Listen to the audience. There’s an actual gasp. An audible gasp. People were genuinely shocked. Anderson Cooper said the word ‘dump’ on live television and America had to sit down and collect itself.”

The gasp was, in fact, audible.

“When is the last time you gasped at something on the news?” he asked. “Not in horror. In surprise. Real surprise. The kind where your mouth opens and you make a small involuntary sound. We’ve lost that. We have completely lost the gasp.”

Dr. Wendy Falk, a professor of media studies at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School who has written extensively on the evolution of political language in broadcast media, said Mr. Tolvanen’s experience reflects a broader cultural phenomenon she has termed “discourse nostalgia.”

“There is a growing subset of Americans who find themselves returning to artifacts of prior media eras — not because they miss the politics, but because they miss the proportionality,” Dr. Falk said. “In 2017, a news anchor using the word ‘dump’ in a hypothetical scenario was enough to dominate the news cycle for forty-eight hours. That ratio of stimulus to response no longer exists in American public life.”

Dr. Falk noted that the Cooper-Lord exchange occupies a “uniquely potent” position in the cultural memory because it represents what she called “the last recorded instance of scalar shock” — a moment in which the level of public outrage was still roughly proportional to the provocation.

“What Mr. Tolvanen is mourning, whether he knows it or not, is a world in which the shock dial still had markings on it,” she said. “The dial is now past the markings. It has been past the markings for some time.”

Mr. Tolvanen’s wife, Karen, offered a more measured assessment of her husband’s viewing habits. “He’s watched it so many times that our daughter asked if Anderson Cooper was a relative,” she said. She was folding laundry in the adjacent room and did not look up. “I told her no. Greg corrected me and said, ‘He might as well be.’”

Mr. Tolvanen acknowledged that his attachment to the clip might seem unusual. He noted that he is not, generally speaking, a man who dwells on the past. He does not collect vinyl. He has no opinion about whether things were better before smartphones. He voted in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and described his political orientation as “I just want everyone to calm down,” a wish he conceded had not been granted.

But the clip, he said, has become something more than a clip.

“It’s a window,” he said. He was holding his phone in both hands now, the screen still frozen on Mr. Cooper’s face mid-sentence. “You watch it and for nine seconds you’re back in a world where a guy says ‘dump’ on CNN and it’s the biggest deal in America. Nine seconds of a country that could still be shocked.” He looked at the screen. “I miss being shocked.”

He set the phone on the arm of the recliner. The house was quiet. From the next room, the sound of laundry being folded continued at a steady pace.

“Karen doesn’t get it,” he said. “But Karen doesn’t watch the news anymore. She says it makes her feel like she’s falling. I told her that’s exactly what I mean.”