Dirty Laundry

I earned my livelihood living on the periphery of the Blue Smoke and Mirrors Machine-at one time I was in broadcasting but discovered the truth was often too situational to be of any lasting value and today's hero was this afternoon's villain.

I decided not only that discretion was the better part of valor but that it also paid better. And as Dylan observed money doesn't talk, it swears. Since I've been told I have a colorful vocabulary, I feel pretty much at home with Benjamins in my wallet and normal hours. Principles are over-rated.

But, like you, I can't be everywhere so I rely on news operations to tell me what they know and I then come to conclusions about what I want to know and how important it is to me. As the years have gone by, however, the pickings have gotten slimmer, Jim, to the point of vanishing before our eyes and ears.

The Pew Research Center releases regularly State of the News Media reports and they are not the happiest of reads, believe me. Read any of them at your leisure, or ignore them at your peril. I find them disquieting like so much else we moderns hath wrought. I grow more concerned by the day at how lazy we customers are about where we shop for 'news.' If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, some of us want to know how much per quack it costs.

We all have neighbors who, when they read the local newspaper, cannot distinguish between a letter to the editor, an editorial, or a news story. Yep, they can't tell one from the other and away we go down the rabbit hole.

And not helping is that news is now a business like it never was at any time since Joshua went the battle of Jericho, 'and we'll be right back with that report on how the walls came tumbling down after this commercial for Sak-Rete.' What would Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow make of the dog's breakfast we have created? They'd probably join Newton Minnow in describing it and we'd ignore the lot of them.

Maybe the most terrifying aspect and I feel that way because it was supposed to be liberating, is the emergence of "new media" a/k/a "social media." The appeal for me as a reader and writer is the platforms are immediate and unfiltered but that also means I must make sure I clearly tell you what is fact and what is my opinion. I cannot allow you for one moment to lose sight of the importance that you are reading a truth, not the truth, but even that is too much because it's my truth.

When a story from the Galvanize All Babies at Birth Guild and the Associated Press are treated by us, the reader/viewer, as worth exactly the same, it may be too late. And then we wonder how we arrive at often thoughtless and venal decisions (because we chose to).

Perhaps after you've finished reading the morning paper (usually takes what? 15 minutes if you do the crossword?) or watch the Happy Talk News on the tube, broadcast, or cable (all the anchors really do sort of look the same) you'll have the chance to have a good long read at those Pew Reports, if you can still remember how to do that because right up with listening to one another, reading has become a lost art.

I'd feel sorry for us but we've created this world in our image and likeness. We wanted fast food for fast times-check. How about news by people who hate to research and report it for people who hate to receive it?  Double check. That order was to go, right? Coming right up.
-bill kenny