We just began our inquiry into the "current" nature and structure of national/local news reporting. My cousin Deb asked an important question about the process, focus and function of "the news" in her email that highlighted the extraordinary generosity of Maine's Worcester Wreathe Company. Since 1992, it's owner has donated and delivered a sizable red-ribboned wreathe to each soldier buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
The email (Snope-checked BTW) questioned why this story hasn't been played forward by and through our national news programs. Tim and I have time to pay attention to lots of news programs and we monitor the stations to see the difference in their structures, process, focus. The implicit and explicit communication factors abound! We've witnessed myriad processes that clearly shape the message that results unless viewers watch critically, consciously.
Comparing and contrasting the dispensing of news among the different stations, various processes become notable: ignoring, highlighting, repeating, spinning differential interpretations, "recontextualizing" information, minimizing, juxtaposing, and encapsulating events in ways that clearly shape inferences that can be drawn by the non-discriminating the viewer/listener.
Very little objective information is presented to simple viewers/listeners during the "Six O'clock" news. To derive actual, unadulterated information, seekers of "What is happening?" have to comb through many different sources and continue to follow day by day evolution of a slowly emerging truth.
Who has time for this long and dragged out journey of discovery? Not many in these days of complex and shifting households, exhausted parents, sleep-deprived commuters, and a general public that suffers numbness from technology-induced over stimulation.
This is an invitation to those of us who do have the time! This time in our human history, this time in our national coming of age becomes our opportunity to engage in home schooling ...of an entirely different kind! Retired elders can make time throughout the day to study what's happening, how it is happening, and vision what could happen in better, more principled ways! Instead of being despondent about the national an world events (as I used to be, thus avoiding exposure to it entirely), we can vision bits of news as current perceptions/events on their way to becoming something more principle-based, more substantially good for all, more aligned with universal truths.
Retired elders have the psychological and collective resources to take this important role in society! The pivotal position is currently unfilled across our sociological life-span. We sport longevity in life experiences and an historic wealth under our belts. Psychologically, retired elders have effectively sharpened their brains daily in the marketplace and have acquired a certain metal, capacity for broader vision, a practiced wealth of perspectives, the realization that there are many different perspectives and that we can project these onto the external world both wisely ... and more often than not: erroneously.
Take Me To Truth (p. 43) reminds us that, "Fear tricks us into states of confusion, anxiety, and dread. In this book, we hope to expose and demystify fear's illusory game and provide an empowering alternative to its deluded intent. Almost all the fear we experience is unnecessary and debilitating. The only real fear we may need to listen to in this world is immediate physical threat, the type that is instinctual and gives us no time to think."
On page 42, the authors help us remember what we invariably discover from the gift of longevity: "Love can flourish only in the absence of fear because fear distorts our perception and blinds us with a cloud of confusion. Love, being opposite to fear, is an endless energy that knows only how to extend (or share) itself, and, by so doing, it increases both for the giver and the receiver. Most of us have been conditioned to know fear more than Love, because that is what our world's culture invests in."
I believe we have entered our nation's early adult stage: learning to make deeper distinctions among the purported messages supplied through our apparently preferred leaders. We are on the brink of reconsidering the matching of their stories with the results of their actions...and how those results align with our real needs. of disillusionment with and distrust of institutional leaders/processes. We've gone beyond the sixties when we expressed distrust for parental and institutional authority in general.
Over the past forty years, we thought if only we had the right leaders, we would have the right life. Still operating under the illusion that any reliable leadership can be found outside our own selves struggling to sort through challenging experience and taking the consequences as they are simply bound to come, our nation went with the apparent "savior." We still politically, as a sociological mass, actually wanted a parent! Why not, as children we experienced that activating our parents can save us from doing the work ourselves. Parents who do their kids' work (walk our own path) ultimately and erroneously communicate to offspring that they (adults) will assume responsibility for making the mistakes, the messes. But in truth, we each make mistakes and messes of our own accord. How can we not? We cannot know everything there is to know so as not to guess erroneously .
Alanis expresses this leap of understanding with elegance:
http://youtu.be/OOgpT5rEKIU
Elders have the time to pay attention in a continual and ongoing fashion to the bits and pieces of "news" abounding outside of ourselves. Elders can make time to compare and contrast, discuss and dialogue, detect and research, read-think-report free of charge (that's a pun ... "news" is rarely reported without a significant "charge" that reflects the "projection" of the particular tribe that reports the news.
In fact, we might more accurately conceptualize presentations of the six o'clock news hours, not as reporting but as news purporting. Think of the news as being purported, not reported. That shift in consciousness might help us question more persistently, more objectively, that which we hear from institutionalized "news" ... and consider politicians as playing a role, the purportors of a perception, a projection, a party line, a hook for your vote.
Hmmmmm, think about it... independently... for as long as it takes to uncover the truth lying beneath a wide array of bits and pieces scattered across a polished political surface.
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