Nearly all people are controlled by outer suggestions, and not by inner realizations. Ordinary man thinks only what he sees others do, and hears others say. We must all learn so to control the inner life that outside things do not make an impression upon our mentalities.
Ernest Shurtleff Holmes - Creative Mind And Success
A definition of the news could be stated as “Recent account; fresh information of something that has lately taken place at a distance, or of something before unknown.”
And since every day has, give or take, millions or very least multiple hundreds of thousands of interesting “going ons” happening throughout Earth, which of those items is rising most to the surface? That’s in order to isolate a couple dozen of those action items at local or global levels worth sharing on that day. So then the next question is, who is making those decisions and why? Is it coming from few locations, or is it coming from an entire society of individuals?
Like any centralized source of big power, regardless of what that is or what side of the political spectrum it comes from, or what it’s role is, it disempowers those who are subservient to it. On the other side of that coin, many thousand or millions of individual nodes, must rely on their substance of content to be noticed and that in regards to journalism, will then work to really inform and empower others at their similar socioeconomic level.
As we have seen an increasing consolidation of everything in virtually every industry in the last century, the news media is certainly no exception to that rule. This is a result of many decades of bad political decisions which help the man, but screw you dear listener. Over the course of this decline, the news has become less about bottom up journalism and instead more about top down infotainment. Due to this business model creating a system which helps the smallest sliver percentage of economically successful folks, the tiny capstone of the commerce pyramid for example, such as the Godzillionair, but screws everyone else, the pyramid has now been turned upside down. It’s de-spiritualized, foundationally untrue, commercial revenue model has become about being paid for by advertisers instead of being paid as a neutral or balanced public service, like a public utility.
Edward R Murrow warned of commercialism in the news. Murrow achieved his legendary status by taking on the witch-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare. He was not afraid to face the fire. It was Murrow's ardent belief in the decision-making capabilities of the American people that drove him. He saw it as the media's responsibility to get the people the facts so that they could make informed decisions. “If we entrust it to those who”, as Murrow noted, “seek only to profit from it without regard to their moral duties, we will suffer the consequences of mass delusion”.
Even though democracy is mob rule which disregards the fallacy of the majority, it’s better than end result left wing communism or end result right wing fascism and you can’t have a resemblance of democracy without a free and open press. Thus, The Society of Professional Journalists are said to be a forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair, thorough, and acts with integrity. The Society declares these four principles as the foundation of ethical journalism and encourages their use in its practice by all people in all media. They are to:
Seek Truth and Report it
Minimize Harm
Act Independently
Be Accountable and Transparent
If the "news" you are watching does not meet at a bare minimum these ethics it is NOT news. PERIOD. All corporate owned media (CNN, RT, MSNBC, BBC, Fox, ABC, Al Jazeera, Sky News, etc...) are all "infotainment" and with only very rare cracks of journalism peeking through these entities which only happens as scraps and leftovers. It takes We, The People, constantly and consistently calling out the big business media on a regular basis to force them to change. Or even better, permanently turning all of it off and throwing live broadcast television anything into the dumpster or digital trash bin. Comedian Bill Hicks said it best.
Since telling the truth gets you little to nowhere within an untrue society, the top down media now does the opposite of Seeking Truth and Report it, Minimizing Harm, Acting Independently, and Being Accountable and Transparent. They create false perceptions, maximizing harm, while acting on behalf of their financieres, in complete opacity. Because its centralized owned by the pyramid capstone hierarchy within commercial commerce, it only cares about other figures who are pyramid capstone hierarchical within commercial commerce. Thus, it generally focuses all its time on a single digit amount of people, one of whom will always be the commander and chief of the United States. The CEO of the corporation, and placating to them and whatever current administration. The run-up to the Iraq War was the most perfect example of this you could ask for. Where things that a 5 year old could tell were blatantly false become so ecco chambered by establishment media figures that the joker spirals of watching television make one think they’re in a carnival of funhouse distorted mirrors.
Those media figures, sitting behind on air desks, used to have journalistic integrity like Walter Cronkite or Murrow, but now they're just hard-core nationalists bobblehead talking point repeater puppets, who’s baby pool shallow depth of subject matter is on the same par with sports broadcasters and scorn any ideas that suggest their country is at fault for anything. The very suggestion that the United States of America might have done anything to provoke rational hatred against it by dropping a $50,000 bomb from a $19,000,000 plane which costs $6000/hr to operate on brown People in Yemen who make $1 per day is heresy to them.
Since real objective journalism must search out the truth in all instances no matter the subject, it can now only be found from obscure independent sources. Usually having to rely on bottom up crowdsource or subscription the same way the old school newspapers did. As the larger now digital newspapers have had to adapt their business model from exclusively just subscription, they and the large network news sources now make the majority of their revenue by traffic and clicks via dollars for advertisers. More clicks and page views, means more advertising revenue. The sad truth is that today's media is thus loyal only to spectacle, and conflagrations attract more eyeballs than in-depth analysis. One way to maximize that element, is by spreading fear. The two moons of Mars (if they are even physical bodies) are Phobos and Deimos. Which translates Fear and Terror.
It’s always wise to take precautions in turbulent times. As having some supplies on hand is never a bad idea. Not like a doomsday fear-based prepper but because homesteading will never go out of style. But constant fear based worry triggers the immune response and the daily barrage of untempered bad news is a kind of psychological warfare designed to keep people in a constant state of disempowerment, always looking to their “authorities” to tell them what’s going on and/or fix the problem.
It’s easy to feel stressed and buffeted by the turbulent events constantly playing out. At the time of this writing much of the world is under a media inspired umbrella of terror due to a world wide virus scare, creating more economic strain on bottom up small business and lower and middle classes that were already being redlined with economic instability and mandating increased social isolation in a post-truth compartmentalized Capitalist society that has for decades has been causing increased compartmentalization and social isolation.
Regardless of the severity of any situation, and whatever it’s origin, however illusory or true, global pandemic scares affect our minds way more than our bodies. With our various countrymen freaking out based on risks that are usually at least a smokescreen or at most not actually at all the real case. Knowing what’s really going on by having a plethora of valid information available through armies of outstanding journalists is key. For to accurately identify a problem is to half fix it. Yet, if an unreliable backwards media is pushing something, we must realize there’s more to the story. Most major world events have always had one side of the coin which were publically told, with the other side being hidden and oftentimes only de-occulted out of the forgotten shadows of history years later. A situation’s legitimacy is derived by no one having anything to gain, especially in terms of money and power collection. So seeing the big business stock market eat shit via mass fear means this might actually be another layer of mother nature pushing back. Yet, the tell that things are fishy is if each supposed solution draws the noose of tyranny much tighter around the necks of what has become an ignorant and gullible populace.
Charles Mackay was a Scottish poet, journalist, and author is remembered mainly for his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Written in 1841, it chronicles various events that swept the masses into collective mania, such as the Mississippi Meltdown, the South Sea Bubble, and other striking examples of crowd psychology and the power of unchecked emotion. As human nature hasn’t changed over time, this book provides a head’s up with regard to how collective hysteria develops and is worth your time.
More than any other contagion, fear seems to be one of those very contagious emotions. The top down media knows this and thus they are a Phobos and Deimos generating machine. Anything that spreads fear is deeply suspect. For example, us burning fossil fuels is asinine and shows what an immature society we are as slaves to the fossil fuel and petrol chemical industries instead of moving in droves to cleaner forms of energy but same goes with climate DOOM. Something is a bit weird there. That doesn't mean we all need to sound like paid shills for the fossil fuel industry and say, “hey, it’s not man made at all and is just a ploy for a global carbon tax, burn as much carbon as you want!” because pollution, factory farming, and deforestation, all fueled by heavy amounts of pollution are FUBAR and regardless of climate change’s causes, bad diet, pollution, and stress are the core causes of mental and physical sickness in people and a green revolution would reduce those things regardless of climate being anthropocentric, natural, or both.
The brown revolution industrial hierarchical 20th century lifestyle that we were unsustainably drifting along with as mother earth fights back is collapsing and that is forward progress. This will be a time of turmoil and thus transformation, and our communities will need self-leadership. It’s all about surrender and trust. Even those of us that know the current way of living is wrong, that capitalism, inequity, ego and the battery farm of consciousness we live in is unsustainable, even then we still hold on. To the comfort zones, to micro changes, to wanting change and yet we collectively resist it. Until it is thrust upon us by our environment.
One can tell how healthy a culture is by how mentally and physically healthy its people are, how it treats mother nature and her inhabitants, the quality of the art it outputs, and how it treats real journalists. The human spirit is incredibly resilient and our traditional wisdoms have always sustained us. We have drifted so far from nature since the onslaught of the industrial and then commercial revolution, our bodies now reflect the imbalance, which is inevitable when we become divorced from nature’s laws. This makes us more vulnerable to physical and mental sickness because our inner terrain is compromised.
We will continue to have species' ego death and rebirth of the old and will have to embrace new ways of being which are really ancient ways of being. On a species level we are entering the medicine of trust, change, acceptance, and there is a gift deep in all this if we embrace it. Everything we know is falling away to make way for the new. We are in the chrysalis stage, when the caterpillar lets go, when it has to transform into the thing that is being born that it cannot even imagine. There is no other way forward to do this without jettisoning “mind killing” fear and terror. A rejection of Phobos and Deimos.