Fake News; Bottom Feeding
I’m not new here by any stretch of the imagination. In fact? I haven’t entered into the “new” territory in a hot minute really. I turn 50 next year and have managed to squeeze many lives into that half-century, all adventure filled. I do own my own news media platform that is for my local county in Indiana. But I’ve been in journalism since high school where my aunt was Editor in Chief of a local small paper, and that paper was ‘black and white and red all over”. I was editor of my high school paper, and I was a journalism major at Ball State University. However, my life did not afford me the luxury of writing and I ran off to discover my world in travel, having a family, living abroad, and many many others. I ended up as a community activist and that actually is what led me back to writing. My community.
With my media company I have the unique opportunity to do this career differently than most. As I navigate the shallow waters of today's shark -filled journalists, swimming around the proverbial fish bowl, taking chomps out of each other; I wonder, can a space be created for what the news used to be, and NOT contribute to sensationalism, misleading or “clickbait” headlines, or even worse, insert myself into the news? I believe it can be if you are brave enough to do it differently. No, I wish to do it old school and actually REPORT the news instead of give my opinions on it. Wow. Did you hear that? Read that again. Just report the news, and leave it to folks to decide how they feel about it.
When I started my company and was deciding what direction I was going in, it occured to me that today's news, even those stations and papers that have been around for decades, are not now what they were first created to be. If only we knew what first mission statements some of them had then, or what they “looked like” in design style. Even the average citizen knows how much the news has changed in the last 20–30 years. Television and Cable gave way to Netflix and Chill, and printed newspapers went online and piped in the associated press on a ticker that no one reads anyway. The next side effect was laying off most of their employees because there just wasn’t enough work to go around.Our local newspapers are owned by out of state corporations, and the ‘news’ they report, shows that clearly. They are a joke. Many of us have our local groups on social media that we can funnel out or receive information from. Gone are the police blotters, the jail lists, births and deaths, or fire or EMS run information. Public Information is taking the hit, and hard.
The cornerstone of what I do is about Public Information, and I have used my right to FOIA request, you betcha! We inform citizens of their right to it as well as their responsibility to use it productively. Many citizens also became aware of their right to privacy and discovered by doing their own FOIA requests, that their names were being run through NCIC by our local police for no reason and that is a BIG no-no. FOIA is the Freedom of Information ACT which the basic function of the Freedom of Information Act is to ensure informed citizens, vital to the functioning of a democratic society. Yet it seems to be the first thing to go, the private, individual rights of the citizen! Here is the clincher: WE ARE ALLOWING IT!!! In some cases, we are BEGGING FOR IT!!!
Everytime I have this conversation with someone, things get awkward, and the other person looks away, muttering something to the conclusion of: “Well, whaddya gonna do…thats how its always been done!” And they say it in a tsk-tsk tone, as if I should know better. WHAT?! Okay, if its always been done that way, MY vote is that we just STOP DOING IT THAT WAY. Are you all kidding me with that drivel and nonsense? Really! Because if that is how its always been done, and its had these horrible results, maybe just MAYBE …WE SHOULD NOT DO IT THAT WAY ANYMORE. For starters. Just let us NOT do it that way. Let us follow the law, and let us do it the way we have decided to. Not the damn ‘good ole boy systems’ way of doing things/ All shady with no accountability. In layman's terms, if you saw folks jumping off the cliff every time they turned 50 years old on their birthday, and the result was that everyone was squashed to a bloody mess at the bottom, would you be in line to take that jump on YOUR 50th birthday? Of course not. Would you spearhead that charge to put an end to that particular event, because it costs us our most valuable citizens who have wisdom and experience? Well you would when it started to affect you. When it was your mother jumping off that cliff or better yet, your turn at that leap of life. How is this any different? People are HUNGRY, HOMELESS, JOBLESS, and now DYING from COVID on our streets, and we are forcing them to jump every day.
Who is leading the marketing on that local leap? The news media is, that’s who. The Journalists and Reporters that want to sell papers and get famous are spoon feeding us that garbage while they enjoy profiting off of our gullibility. Well not this journalist. I won’t subscribe to it and I certainly don’t trust most news leaders today…Not CNN, not NBC, not FOX. I trust myself when it comes to doing the right thing, and while its not going to be wildly popular? I trust that there are others out there leading their own charge much like I am. If you are interested in that? Contact me. I’ll be the one in the trenches, hated and boo’d, you know, smiling from ear to ear, because I get to actually change the world…one person at a time. Come join me.
Freedom. That’s what it's all about folks. Freedom to be informed, not fooled. Freedom to rise above the accepted norm, and operate at a higher level. Freedom to be the change you want to see in this world, to be better than the expected.
Thanks for listening, and be intentional everyone. Mean it. Mean what you do and mean what you say, more than you ever have before. It matters.
