I don’t want to feed the media beast…
I am not interested in who is right/who is wrong in their minds..
Media pundits have explained that they have simply given people what they want, reporting the best they can on what’s happening.
If that is the case – what does that say about us?
It has becoming ever more clear that the attention-seeking, profit-driven media industrial complex drives our culture even more than it reports on it.
Thoughtful people regularly bemoan our loss of civility, the rise of trolling and bullying and most of all, divisive behavior designed to rip people apart instead of moving us productively forward.
And at the very same time, reality TV gets ever better ratings. So much so that the news has become the longest-running, cheapest to produce and most corrosive TV show in history. Increase that exponentially by adding in the peer-to-peer reality show that is social media, and you can see what’s happening.
Once something is created, it takes on a life of its own. And like any living thing the core function is to continue to stay alive – at all cost. It stays alive because we feed it.
More than anything, profit-driven media needs our active participation in order to pay their bills.
What if we stop buying into it? What if we stop taking the bait?
Perhaps we can find the resolve to seek out the others, to connect and to organize in a direction that actually works.