"We have Met The Enemy..."

“We Have Met The Enemy…”

“If it bleeds, it leads!” The mantra of the so-called news business… It’s easy to find fault with those folks for their seemingly insatiable appetite for morbid news, sensational headlines, and outlandish ‘teaser comments’ to grab our attention… Why do they do that? Quite simply, it’s because it works.

Readership or viewership are the metrics by which they are measured… and the basis upon which advertising rates, ergo revenues, are calculated… Therefore, they are, for better or for worse, the holy grail pursued by one and all. So long as ‘we’ provide demonstrable proof it draws us to the ‘news product’ being offered, it will be the method applied… Only when some other tactic produces better ‘results’ will any change occur.

All ‘news providers’ pay lip service to the ideals of being there to provide truth and accuracy in presenting important information about relevant, newsworthy issues. Fact is, they are a business there to provide a means of making a profit. Nothing at all wrong with that, by the way, because that is the way we all produce, package, and sell our own labor to support ourselves.

The fact they aspire to do that ethically and honestly is an 'individual's' ideal, and it is limited in scope and degree to the ethics and integrity of individual decision makers within a particular news organization. As with any ‘institution’, news organizations are neither moral nor immoral… they are amoral. They are abstractions, mere tools employed by individuals to accomplish certain aims, and, as such, they have no intrinsic values, conscience, or special allegiance to ‘truth’… Like a hammer, for example…

A hammer is a tool. It is a good one to employ if one wants to pound nails. It is also effective when one wants to pound someone else on the head for nefarious purposes. Is the hammer ‘moral’ in the first case but ‘immoral’ in the second; or, are judgements about ‘morality’ more appropriately applied to the person wielding that tool? Likewise, with any institution…

Corporations are evil and inherently corrupt! Really? As with charities, civic clubs, churches, political parties, unions, schools, motorcycle clubs, any organizational tool devised by people to marshal resources and leverage the abilities of individuals, and to bring unity of effort and synergy to a task, they remain tools… neither good nor bad, moral nor immoral. Morality only applies to people, to those who decide how and why a tool is actually used…

It’s easy to blame the tool, but it is inappropriate, in my view. It is convenient and far easier, though, because it allows us to avoid confronting the real source of the problem… human thought and behavior. A complex, bewildering tar-baby for sure, and one that defies simple definition and succinct description.

Simple explanations and easy to understand concepts simply do not apply and cannot be found, to totally explain all the things we do… and why we do them… Even more daunting a task would be to identify possible answers, then try to gain widespread agreement! As ‘Pogo’ the comic strip character astutely observed, “We have met the enemy… and he is us.”

DDT

P.S. The thought for this post and the content were developed while riding 'our girl' recently...