My feelings on journalism, and how I wish we’d start doing it again.
Looking back, the first thing to remember is that opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, at least all humans do. Ever since we (humans) formed modern governments in which the average citizen feels they have some semblance of control in their surroundings or at least feels that they ought to stay informed, we’ve also created means by which we spread information en masse.
The town crier, the print press, the radio, local TV broadcast stations, serialized periodicals, national broadcast stations, on-demand streaming media, and everything in between represent many mediums of journalism. The idea of journalism was that it was supposed to inform us of the facts—who, what, when, where, why, how. And as much as it were possible, the broadcaster, writer, was supposed to keep their own interests out of it. “Just give me the facts, Jack.”
Subsequent iterations of technology resulted in marvels that we never suspected. Every individual had a voice, and now they could be heard. Every individual had a platform. We were able to communicate instantly across the world individual to individual, and individual to the world, at the touch of a button. Any form of entertainment was now ready to be consumed at the convenience of the operator.
These developments seem like a good thing, and in many ways are; however, there remains a huge problem. Us. We are still simple beasts, operating with the same primitive nervous system and the same series of chemical bells and whistles that we always have. They spur us to action one way or the other. It kept the caveman alive by sparking immense feeling and emotion when sensing a tiger in the bushes. Our bells and whistles are engaged through a small, almond-sized portion of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala and many other parts of our brain have never been able to communicate and consume at such a rapid rate over such long periods of time as we do now. It may not have been designed to do this at all, but here we are.
Modern entertainment and social media have created a business model that spurs people to action through pressing the same primitive buttons. They act on a sense of communal engagement (or enragement as it were). But the excitement is manufactured.
On the one hand, the barriers to entry in many industries are lower than ever before. People are able to produce their own entertainment and media from their own homes and put it out to the world in a way that was never before possible. Communities that were not able to have their voice heard above the ruling demographic are now able to voice themselves like never before.
On the other hand, the water cooler chatter has died. We are no longer arriving at work on Monday morning and talking about seminal events. We aren’t discussing how we feel about facts with each other after witnessing the same set of evidence as everyone else.
This is where we come to the current state of journalism.
Journalism is now operating on a for-profit business model (maybe they always were).
This is not its fault.
Businesspeople have realized that the local broadcast, even the national broadcast, cannot compete with the flood of on-demand communication and information feeds plugged in to each individual. Providing who, what, where, when, why, how, alone is not enough for this on-demand crowd. The journalists have engaged survival mechanisms and gone along with the plans of the businesspeople to survive in these modern times.
In order to compete, the journalista must engage in tactics to prod the amygdala.
…Except instead of seeing a tiger in the bushes as our ancestors once did, one now reads the word “tariff” and “woke” used over and over to the same effect, spurring people to marvelous fits of emotion, in which they feel the need to stand up on a soapbox and pronounce to the world how they feel about a thing. Your dear old Aunt Margaret is kept awake at night thinking that an immigrant gang rapist is going to trudge through her upper-middle-class midwestern town and teach all the children how to transform into gay trans Muslim terrorists like some kind of magical fairy godmother. Then they’ll take all of the jobs too and probably take your guns. Once the fear is engaged, they’ve hooked poor old Aunt Margaret like a fish, and will never let her go or cut her off. She will tell you how she feels and who to blame ad nauseam in the comments of a Facebook post.
Businesses own the broadcast. Certain stations must broadcast one view to keep a demographic enraged, whereas other stations must broadcast the opposite view. The owners of these ad dollars care very little about what that story is, so long as they keep getting them. The mission is simple—report the news even if there isn’t more news to report. Engage the amygdala.
The average journalist starts off with pie-in-the-sky intentions and probably believes that they are doing the job that was done in years past. But once they are integrated into the machine, they become little more than an ad puppet themselves, promoting the agendas and views of one business or another that in turn has interests in getting policy in place that allows for their continued existence like some sort of mythological monster that continues to grow for the sake of growth itself—A Gugalanna Bull of endless expansion. In their own insular echo chambers, they probably still believe they are doing good, necessary work. The problem of fact checking, recognizing bias, and calling out the agenda of controlling interests becomes second to the goal of maintaining attention in the attention economy.
Attention earns money.
Money is a thing that people use to exchange for goods and services. It’s based on nothing now (it used to represent a solid amount of gold or silver in the USA). It’s entirely made up now, notional suit and tie machinations. But people do theoretically need it to survive in the modern world to pay for their shelter, medical bills, food, clothing, etc. People work to earn it. There is a small group of people who have most of the money in the world, who could likely take care of the basic needs of everyone else, but choose not to, for some fear of no longer feeling special. They’ve ostensibly won the game, and for some reason, they want more of it (money). They could buy everything in the world and just own it outright, and still feel that they need more. It’s a sickness that needs to be cured. It may be another part of the amygdala ran wild. These people are afraid I think that if they stop, they won’t be enough. They don’t realize that you can’t fill a bottomless hole, but try anyway. To the onlookers, they don’t look terribly happy, despite all the things they have.
On the one hand, these people spur the kind of progress that allows for everyone to have a platform. They spur the kind of progress that could, in fact, solve all the problems for everyone else that are sans resources to do so. They built these systems and then coerced them so they could continue their own growth, at any cost.
…Journalists used to report that, despite the threat to their existence. Perhaps they should again, as it is now, in this time of fear, mobilized by less than honorable intentions, there maybe no better a time to set the facts straight as journalism was intended to do.
I believe in journalism and its necessity, if only it were allowed to actually do journalism again.
