“If evil geniuses are so rare, why do so many bad people get away with so many crimes against their fellow citizens, and, when they become leaders of nations, against humanity?”— Dean Koontz
When reality doesn't fit
By Olga Rodríguez: Years ago, being in a country in conflict, someone on the other end of the phone told my team that the report we had sent was not going to make the news because “it didn't fit”. At our side was the orphaned mother of a son who had just told us how he had been murdered. At our feet, a carpet of corpses. I looked at her, who had made a painful effort to recount what happened on camera, between tears: "I tell it so that it is known, so that decent people do something." I observed the inert bodies. How to tell that woman that we had wasted her time? Instead of broadcasting a chronicle about what had possibly been a war crime, the "news" preferred to dedicate a minute of its time to show "the beauty" of the most expensive Christmas tree in the world, decorated with diamonds and rubies for not I know what an aristocrat. I wished that those corpses, some so young, would collapse on the editor's desk and wake him from his blindness.
Over the years, in the exercise of my profession, I have seen war crimes, children killed by so-called smart weapons, massive bombardments of the civilian population, arbitrary detentions, victims of torture with consequences for life, hospitals full of people wounds with doctors performing surgical operations on the floor of the corridors, mothers looking for their children in the morgues and in the rubble of buildings shot at... I have also seen here, in Spain, families without resources, victims of evictions without alternative housing, people very poor with their dignity afloat, young people with no future, women with no desire to live, no electricity, no gas, no one. Too often some of these facts were -and remain- out of the news grid, replaced by banalities, by frivolous and inconsequential stories. On one occasion, a mediocre editor told me that the struggle of a Guatemalan woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize was not "television." Remember: you don't have to look only at how a means of communication counts something, but also in what doesn't count. Journalism decides what is talked about and how what is talked about is talked about. His power is enormous and the degeneration of much of him has been dizzying in recent years.
There are not a few people in my profession who began to denounce its decline a long time ago. For a few years we were branded as exaggerated and even sore losers by people who didn't understand that we had turned down comfortable jobs simply on principle. I lived with enormous frustration the contrast between two worlds, between two scenarios: the one outside, where reality took its course, and the one inside the newsroom, contained within four walls, often isolated from the facts that defined our present. Journalism in too many places was being reduced to clocking in and out, staring at the computer, watching the tickers fall. The newsrooms were transformed into offices.
That frustration led to a pain that only subsided when I decided to leave that environment. I thought then that I was definitely leaving journalism, but here I am. I leave it once every two months or so, in my mind, to remind myself that there is always a way out when cynicism, hypocrisy, and journalism in the service of abuse lurk. This noble discredited profession is not easy.
Why am I telling you this? Because it is interesting to reflect on truth and lies, reality and fiction, experience and its absence. Hannah Arendt explained that “the ideal subject for a totalitarian government” is “the individual for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) have ceased to exist. When reality is treated as something debatable in journalistic spaces, the border with fiction can be diluted. When the newsrooms turn their backs on the edges of our present, the debate is reduced to mere entertainment, exempt from its consequences.
Amador Fernández-Savater maintains in his book The Strength of the Weak that in these times there is a tendency “that makes us believe that the outcome of the cultural battle does not depend on the truth of the stories but on their communicative effectiveness”. The truth is not as important as hooking, entertaining and convincing. Dialogue is cornered, monologues that collide are opted for, by the format of the zasca. Everything is staging and calculation on behalf of the electorate and the audience.
On the comfortable pillows of privilege, reality is reduced to mere theory, a harmless game, a banality: there is no connection with the consequences of the acts, with the affected bodies, with the effects of indifference. The victims are just numbers without names or faces, poverty is just a word. Climate change, human rights, migration or macro-farms are debated as if they were abstractions without concrete results in which the interlocutor can defend a position or its opposite in the same way that in a video game we choose sides. There is no journey of knowledge or experience that goes from cause to consequence.
The health of our democracies is seriously affected by that perverted and frivolous pastime that some call journalism, fed by a type of politics lacking in principles. All this explains not only the latest hoaxes, but a good part of the dynamics of the public debate of the last decade in our country. When sanity arrives, everyone will like to say that they have been practicing good journalism for some time, with ethics, with rigor, with conscience. Ha!
Original source: https://www.eldiario.es/opinion/zona-critica/realidad-no_129_8647174.html
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