The NEWS Is Dead – Long Live The News

 The NEWS Is Dead – Long Live The News

By Dave Horrigan

The future and thus the history of Humanity depends upon the fate of the everyday news. Clean, fresh, pure news, like water and air, contributes to the growth and health of society both mentally and physically. Bad news can drive a man crazy and is, in one extreme, cited as a triggering event that can become a precursor to a mass homicide. Defective news, strategically introduced, can also be a weapon of war insidiously driving the recipient to extreme action or worse, extreme apathy.

News is supposed to be a report of facts denoting Who, What, Where, When and Why. Modern keepers of the mantra now prefer Time, Place, Form and Event as that model is more specific and denotes a more effective sequence for classification and the detecting of errors in reporting. Errors in those four items are the red flags exposing hidden agendas of the news source.

Dumping the Why eliminates conjecture. Generally speaking, reporters stop being reporters and become analysts when they enter the realm of Why. This column is based on analysis of as opposed to reporting the news.

Modern news is being displaced by entertainment. Modern news is being sold with inciting adjectives and compelling “facts” that don’t necessarily relate to the event being reported. Of course, modern news is rife with passion infused into the report by reporters with an un-newsy agenda.

Detecting inaccurate news, however, is the subject of another column. This column is to show the future of society based upon the future of news.

I mentioned earlier that clean, fresh, pure news, like water and air, contributes to the growth and health of society both mentally and physically. And thus dirty, stale and corrupt news contributes to the stress, chaos and angst of our families and friends, businesses and general survival. So much so that equation looks like this… Oligarchs covertly running the world, psychopaths popping up more and more frequently murdering record numbers of children, suicide rates doubling every couple of years and corporations and the politicians they purchase finding it increasingly normal to abandon responsible behavior… that’s not the future, that’s now. That future has a diminished Man that is a burden on himself and that future compels that he exit life to improve the situation.

Oh my, that’s grim. But it’s not the future I see. I see a future where knowledge and wisdom and truth are recognized as the precious commodities they are and harvested with care and priority. These virtues along with courage are recognized and fully supported by all of society. And we seek out the news as part of our connection to ourselves, to help steer a better course. In the process, we discover our true nature is good, and fun and happy.

The punishments for corrupting the souls of Humanity should be that the offenders be shown the hells of the souls abandoned by society.

Even fiction has a place in this future. Fiction postulates various pathways with various stumbling blocks and various adventures as we stagger  towards enlightenment.

And so here are the predicted pathways towards clean, fresh, pure news.

First, all news media and their minions must minister truth. Not philosophical truth, but factual, observable, unvarnished truth. This is their dues for entry into humanity’s trust. All news must be labeled news and not confused with education or entertainment or product awareness. Free speech be dammed. News reporters do not have the right to lie.

Software will eventually tell us the source of all information and rate it as to quality or agenda. We have that capability now but we haven’t had a taste for it. But heroism is always in fashion and we have an army of passionate youth looking for their place. Organizations and individuals who circumvent this electronic stool pigeon model shall be recognized as anti-society and quarantined from further contamination in as many realms as suitable.

As we now recognize Vietnam Vets, we should also recognize the reporters who finally did stop that war and the price they paid. And we should recognize the thousands of patriots of the pen who stood up and were shot down and stood up again. These are the heroes that most determinedly maintained and defended and ultimately thwarted the foes of this country.

Let us recognize that the purpose of experts is to paint grey in between the black and white. The grey is the realm of the lawyers, marketing execs, politicians, preachers and yes, even columnists. The quest of news reporters is to report the black and white.

This is the path to our clean, fresh and pure future.