(This is a serialization of the draft for my book, Expectations, Hopes and Dreams.)
It’s Personal
Turn on the TV at the appointed time and you will see this talented, experienced, perhaps even charismatic newsreader offering you a dose of journalistic narrative.
These people have to eat, you know. Did you pay for this presentation to come into your presence? Maybe you bought the equipment for viewing, funded the electricity required to operate it, and maybe even a bit more for the transmission over a wire or satellite receiver. That newsreader gets none of that. Their pay comes from the journalistic enterprise that organizes this presentation, often as a subsidiary of some broadcast company.
Those companies in turn get their money from advertisers. But then, the whole thing is regulated to some degree, so there are more controls and inputs. Yet the newsreader pretends that he is merely offering a digest of significant events of the day that might affect you. Of course, on another channel or through a different medium, you’ll get an equally charismatic newsreader to report the same exact events with a totally different narrative.
Both pretend to observe the same professional journalistic standards, but any given viewer might decide that one or both is a liar.
The presentation itself has become a ritual in our society. Changing the music, the graphics and the mood on the set, along with the intonation and word choices of the newsreader, plus that all important facial expression and camera angle, can push the meaning of any give story all over the political map. Some of us recognize that the very choice of what stories to run is also a measure of the agenda, but at some point we all agree to give it our attention. It has somehow become the expected thing all decent people do.
“Don’t you watch the news?” The question itself is a narrative loaded with manipulation. And if you simply read the news in print or online, you are trading a face you can see for one you cannot. Everything else is the same pretense of journalistic integrity.
Introducing third parties between you and the events of real life does not make it a more accurate narrative. The truism — “everybody is looking for something” — was commonly used well before it was added to popular song lyrics. Your science teacher was supposed to have engaged in enough lab experience to gain a sense of what was accurate or useful theory, but then was probably handed a curriculum shot through with a political agenda. Sometimes it’s not even subtle. If your teacher prefers his job over the alternatives, he’ll stick to the script closely enough to avoid being fired. So even your amateur student lab experience was tainted by a broad set of controls that excluded factors politically inconvenient for those in charge.
Most of us are not cynical enough, not by a long shot.
We should not be manipulated into seeking some mythical body of truth, but only a tolerable truce with all the various political agendas. If you don’t seek to build your own personal agenda, you’ll end up swallowing a mixed bag of pieces from others. If you don’t have your own personal narrative, you can’t be a person. You will merely be a reflection of one or more other persons and repeat their narratives. The pretense of objectivity is just an excuse to enslave you to a narrative shared by however many agree to the standard. Even if it’s the majority of the human race, it’s still just a collection of godlings enabling each other to quash any narrative they don’t like.
Evidence can be faked. Photographs and videos are now easily altered, but it has always been possible with the right equipment and talent. If you weren’t there, you will have to decide whether the reports are accurate, valid or even important to you. If you were there, you’d be a fool not to question your own senses and logic to some degree. Computers and pure math? If you don’t understand it well enough to formulate it on your own, what difference does it make? You can’t verify what you are told; you still have to take someone’s word for it. Computer experts and even mathematicians are looking for something.
In the end, you still have to operate by your own narrative. It’s very personal.
