Ask any journalist and they will tell you their purpose:
- Give voice to the voiceless.
- Hold the powerful accountable.
Or as Poynter now writes it:
- Give voice to the voiceless; document the unseen.
- Hold the powerful accountable, especially those who hold power over free speech and expression.
This is interpreted as finding something that someone views as wrong (hence, awful) or finding someone that is oppressed and then criticizing their oppressor.
The result is the media mostly finds things wrong – and rarely to never finds anything that is right.
We are bombarded with creative story telling informing us the world is awful and everything is terrible.
It is no surprise that anxiety and depression have skyrocketed among the young who been taught to believe everything they are told and not to question (to at least avoid being canceled).
The media is presenting a world view that is warped and wrong.
Over several months I began summarizing various stories in the media about Americans who have moved abroad. The stories follow a formula:
- America is awful <insert reasons>
- This person or couple moved to <this country> where everything is wonderful.
- And often times “found love” (the romance angle).
Nearly every story about Americans moving abroad is in this format. Don’t believe it? Go check out my summaries with links to the stories: Immigration: The media myth that Americans can just move abroad for a better life – Coldstreams Travel and Global Thinking
Reading these media stories finds the same message: everything about America is wrong and awful, and America is the worst country in the world. It is so awful, that millions of people give up everything and risk their lives to immigrate across the southern border in pursuit of an awful life in America.
It makes no sense.
Most journalism has become bad story telling by people with English Lit, Creative Writing and history degrees (about 4 out of 5 “journalists” have a humanities or arts degree) who have all been trained to think the same.
As an aside, a lawyer is trained to think like a lawyer, a doctor is trained to think like a doctor, a nurse is trained to think like a nurse, an engineer is trained to think like an engineer. These specialties are useful on their own, but they lead us to view the world in different ways from others. Reporters are trained to view the world in their own unique way – which seems to be to constantly find something that can be presented as wrong, evil and needs correcting.
The media has become a monoculture of surprisingly elite, mostly young in their 20s, majority female, with degrees in the humanities and arts (about 4 in 5 reporters have degrees in these areas): Media: Who Reports the News? – Social Panic (coldstreams.com)
A surprising number came from upper class to wealthy households, attended prestigious elite universities (unsubsidized costs of attendance in 2023/2024 are typically $250,000 to $350,000). Many study abroad and then go on to $100,000 Masters degrees in journalism or writing – to get jobs with an averaged pay of about $50,000 per year. This makes no economic sense.
The bottom line is that the people who report the news, with the largest audiences, have little in common with the people they write about or the people their writing is intended for.
And they all report that the country, the world, everything is awful, all the time, every day. Every where they look, they find something awful. They are incapable of finding anything good – or even demonstrating the slightest skepticism about how they themselves have been manipulated.
