Morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between.
No Valentine’s without coffee!
News you can trust.
“All the News That's Fit to Print”. I don’t expect most to remember this NYT motto was created in 1897. That was way before the WP “Democracy dies in darkness” slogan of 2017, now turned into “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”
In a televised world these seem like relics today, even if the NYT switched “print” to “click” on its website. More like clickbait. Growing up, I fell in love with my grandparents’ old radio they used to get close to as the words “This is London” came through the speaker. News they could trust. In today’s world, even the BBC World Service has been compromised by opinion. The WP is right: we are down to “riveting storytelling” instead of journalism.
NPR tells us the news but immediately followed by some “expert” in the matter, bowing down to the storyteller reality we live in. News are no longer enough. We are not to be trusted with judgement and need to be told what they mean. The sad truth is most of us really do: lack the judgement to understand the news. We also became addicted to the storytelling, especially when it comes to televised news. News channels are 5% journalism and 95% opinion. Roughly.
We flock to the opinions we like and trash the ones we don’t and in the process the news itself is lost. Reassured by my grandparents experience I also grew up with newspapers and tv newscasts that lasted about an hour, three or four times a day, with no commercial breaks. Those were the days! There was barely time to broadcast the news, let alone give airtime to opinion makers. We used to digest it, discuss it over coffee and form our judgement by ourselves.
There were propaganda reports, for sure. During the years of fascist rule, as a child in Portugal, my grandparents ways returned and people would gather around their radios, turned the volume down, and listened to London again. News you could trust. The old ways of the resistance in Europe lived well beyond 1945 in places like Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Poland… The USSR itself. The lessons I learned inform the way I consume the news today.
The almighty internet is not a problem for me but rather the solution to cut through the noise and the storytelling. That’s where the news is hiding. News agencies like AP or Reuters still work, verified by new outlets living in the ethereal bytes like Meidas Touch. Newspapers still report news, believe it or not, from the Haaretz to the Guardian, all over the world. Even NPR news service still works, if you tune out before the storytelling starts.
Today we are witnessing the end of an era. Not just the demise of the newly assumed storytelling news but the end of the news system as we knew it, with all its changes that mostly were for the worse. “The enemy of the people” narrative is back in full swing and, like every other aspect of a free society, legacy media (and all mainstream media) is threatened. Some of it is already gone. It will get worse.
Our options are clear: we either fight for the reinstatement of storytelling or fight for the rebirth of journalism. It seems to me that the former is a waste of time and as for the latter it can only happen from the ashes of the current news media. So we should crush it. Rather than save a corrupt and biased media we need to destroy it so it can rise anew. In a time when practically all legacy media and their employees are bought and paid for by billionaires they became untrustworthy.
News became a billion dollar racket, dependent on advertising to make a profit. And subscribers, of course. It also became more propaganda than you’d think, beyond the punditry and storytelling. The news is broadcasted as propaganda even before the pundits and storytellers (aka commentators, aka journalists) start spinning them. I stopped watching them and subscribing them. If we all do the same they will all die.
The hard core skeptics will howl we are lost without news and we must save them. They are both right and wrong. We will be lost without news but, in my opinion, we need to create a true news system that eliminates the illusion it became and returns to the roots of journalism itself. Photojournalists do it best. That’s the paragon of journalism. Each frame is opinion free. You see it. There’s no noise or explanation. The story becomes history. The storyteller is silent.
Not a storyteller at all but a witness. The first witness who then shares it with us so we can become witnesses as well and through our experience, perspective and reason make our judgement. Journalists, true journalists, are like photographers. Their camera is a pen or a keyboard. Their photographs are paragraphs. They write down a picture for us; unbiased; untouched by opinion or useless adjectives. They are witnesses, sharing the truth.
For the news is the truth. We allowed it to become a caricature of it. It now conceals the truth rather than preserve it. We need to stop consuming this garbage we call news and start finding it where it lives still: hiding in the terabytes of information untouched by the storytelling thugs who saw it there first too. There are some honest storytellers among the opinion makers, who try to bear witness to the news. Don’t worry about them. They will survive.
As we take on the destruction of the corrupt mainstream media, the few honest journalists and opinion experts will be saved by it and rise from the ashes as the pioneers of a renewed journalism we all must fight for. The one that does not care about anything but the truth. The one that through photographs or paragraphs bear witness to it first hand and pass it on to us and our judgement.
Stay informed. Find out where the news is hiding and bear witness. We are, in a way, all journalists now. In today’s world we must stop watching and reading what a few billionaires spoon feed us as the news. We must show them there’s no longer a future for their business model. We must destroy it so the real newscasting can rise from its ashes. Stop watching “the news”. Start finding the news where it is hiding. And bear witness.
