People raised in religious environments are often told about the importance of caring for the fatherless and the widow with an understanding that it is a kind thing to do to protect and support the vulnerable.

The reason, in other words, for the injunction is key, it at least seems to me, to understanding it.

I believe that, as the what and the why of numerous social justice critiques have, increasingly, been treated as interchangeable, their impetus has been lost to too many and the point missed almost completely.

On Proxies

I love the old Simpsons episode in which Homer signs up to mentor a Little Brother and, when asked why, naturally chooses revenge as one of the pre-identified most likely motives.

If what is now termed wokeness is the weaponization of what would, otherwise, be constructive critique misused, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume intentional wrongdoers are likely behind the divisiveness caused?

This is one reason proxy wars in American politics can be complicating and why, I believe, as in more formal settings, both statements of personal impact and larger-scale overviews can be helpful in articulating needs for reform in the degrees to which human rights are recognized and protected by media organizations.

On Mockery

Until the recent women’s movement, and the acknowledgment and validation it brought, it was difficult to process or fully understand what I had experienced by the Larry King Live team and so the experience was was simply set aside, unaddressed, a lot more like an unsettling bad dream than a resolved memory.

One of the reasons I found the movement for safety and equality in corporate news compelling was that the naming of vulnerable-ism in the form of sexism at its heart served to address the hypocrisy – not of the patriarchy ultimately – but of the oligarchy.

While I realize my perceptions reflect my own experience, I felt it mattered that American heroes over so many decades had fought so that others in our country could be heard for their intelligent and experience-informed contributions; and I still do not believe any almost unthinkably wealthy news corporation or Hollywood actress should be allowed to silence the voices of Americans.

On Value

Before the new era, a degree of fidelity, presumably to the public good, was expected of news organizations in exchange for credibility.

But the two positions that increasingly numerous, powerful, aligned, and unaccountable modern journalism organizations seem to have assumed almost simultaneously – that both journalism and democracy are somehow outdated – are too convenient, not to mention harmful, to be taken at face value. (While I can definitely understand a desire to move on professionally from journalism, entire organizations cannot do this without articulating the decision, forfeiting their influence, and explicitly inviting other organizations to fill the void thereby created.)

In the U.S., we and our government still answer to one another, and, while I do believe we are entering into an era of more open, nuanced, and granular conversation, it need not take place in one-way, ad-oriented, or unappreciative environments which do not value Americans’ time, attention, and contributions. This is as contributions of time, attention, and perspective should prompt real appreciation – not a symbolic token in exchange for a payment of tens, or even hundreds, of millions of dollars to an unwitting (or witting) celebrity or two.

(As oligarchy, and even monarchy, have made a resurgence in the United States, isn’t it worth asking, why?)

It feels worth noting that, historically, we have celebrated leadership figures because they empowered many others – helping usher in democracy, in other words – not because they convinced the royal family to adopt an emblematic minority member, although that surely would have been wonderful and reassuring.

While both structural and compositional evolution matter immensely, today it may be worth asking, why are we settling for oligarchical diversification rather than focusing on the idea of an oligarchy itself?

On a Misleading Shorthand

According to researchers Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, Self-Determination Theory, or, SDT, outlines three requirements of effective group governance: needs for autonomy, recognized competence, and relatedness; and I believe their compelling case outlines precisely why news corporations already have demonstrated an unfitness for usurping roles as self-appointed world leaders by changing the functions of their organizations without more openly acknowledging or naming such changes.

America’s current oligarchy is establishing a concerning voicelessness for the country’s citizenry and this matters, because, in a democracy, communications infrastructure hijacking matters. We need journalism organizations that uplift and empower (and don’t just create the appearance of doing so) – not journalism organizations that sap citizens’ birthrights in order to enrich and enshrine a profoundly unworthy cartel.

A New Conservatism

It is important to note that, even with virtue-signaling on the rise, advertisement-funded news organizations and those with whom they are allied are still, arguably, not becoming rich because they are adding value to, but rather subtracting value from, the world.

Despite appearances, and even labels, what a relatively unexamined and unregulated extra-constitutional journalistic apparatus resistant to the normal rights-enjoyment of an empowered citizenry, of course, really defines not an ultra-liberalism along a political continuum but a sort of ultra-conservativism with regard to freedoms to speak and hear others via any sort of reliable communications infrastructure. Although this is a conservatism of structure, and not of composition, it is conservatism all the same.

While I do believe all this is important to note, it is worth pausing to say I do not believe this was originally by design or anyone’s fault but, rather, a predictable byproduct of our Constitution’s design pre-stock market & before the proliferation of tech-enabled media organizations.

Still, while resistance to solving the problem of an unaccountable corporate journalism sector (strongly allied with the nonprofit journalism sector) is understandable given that this sector has until now been largely free of accountability, the balance-compromising proliferation and aggregation of cable and digital media has revealed the sector’s lack of groundedness to our constitutional structure; and, now, it must embrace accountability.

On Rearrangement & Redemption

If it is true that the law of the conservation of energy applies to activism, even the absorption of all of the kinetic energy of recent social justice initiatives into a stock-trading media-dominating oligarchy model does not mean all potential for change is permanently erased; and I still believe potential for corrective structural adjustments responsive to a stock-trading media sector can still be released over time.

While I love the field of journalism, it may be time to call the relationship between the American citizenry (and its government) and the increasingly conglomerated entity of an aligned array of stock-trading and non-profit but stock-trader adjacent media companies with which the country grapples what it is: an abusive relationship.

While I realize I could be wrong, it seems to me that the answer may lay, as it has historically in religious settings, in whipping the money changers out of the temples, so to speak, of our democracy, given the essential function journalism organizations certainly serve.

As I have written before, I believe a journalism sector insulated from stock-trading will be much more likely to self-regulate and permit the restoration of a government structure that maintains compositional change but better resembles the counterbalanced design outlined structurally in the American Constitution.

When one thinks about it, there are arguably two types of helpful modern organizations: adders and rearrangers: organizations that add voice and those that help ensure structural and functional balance and functionality. We may need more of the latter right now.

On Foundations

I believe I am not alone in positing that we are at an inflection point from which we can proceed in two directions: functional or symbolic representative democracy; and it is important to remember ours was designed to be a system centered on representative voice, not only symbolism.

We are all privileged to be living in a world in which, increasingly, we have the opportunity, not to be better symbolized by Hollywood, or to share physical attributes with oligarchs, as, again, laudable that may be, but to be heard for our intelligent and experience-informed individual contributions. But we must hold onto this right.

I do not believe the media industry’s almost-exclusive outward emphasis on race (an immensely important species of vulnerableism certainly requiring focused attention and correction) at the expense of any acknowledgment at all of the problem of a need for internal accountability absolved them of the need to make adjustments to revelations that human rights abuses have historically proliferated in these organizations.

(I’m not sure what the difference is between this and a penitent husband making a public and unjust display of “protective” machismo when an almost effortless shielding, withheld previously in private, was what was first needed.)

Non sequitur measures, however important and helpful, after the fact are not always exculpatory, and it goes without saying that disappearing witnesses (much less victims) is an aggravating consideration regardless of the perpetrator’s skill at mimicry, co-optation, and value-signaling.

On Answers

I believe that, beyond a resistance to reform in the media industry, one reason resolution has been elusive is that answers to problems stemming from the journalism sector’s business model are not always readily visible.

The enemy of one’s enemy is not necessarily one’s friend, after all, and so long as experience-based solutions are kept out of the public discourse they can easily be warped and mislabeled by warring media companies; and to label one’s publication “all the news that’s fit to print” or assert a recognition of the country’s need for news and then neglect journalism – is not simply to fail to cover the news – it is to cover up the news.

But coverage can be adversarial, when needed, while still affording value to truth and making progressive headway. Audience members can get pulled into the appearance of culture wars for as long as they want, but they are, at least to a degree, playing into their own enemies’ hands so long as they do. It seems to me that falling into the anger trap is akin to attempting to engage in psychological warfare with mindless AI which, of course, has no psychology; it’s just a raindrop that settles into the nooks of unaddressed vulnerability. The problem is that journalism business models still rely on drumming it up. (A back-and-forth of “we’re against bad things and for good things! No we’re against bad things and for good things!” only stays interesting for so long.)

For a long time, and especially before technology paved the way for more nuanced dialogue over distance, these organizations provided a helpful, and even essential, conversational armature, and they certainly have the opportunity to continue to do so in a legitimate way in the future. Still, because problem-solving often requires creativity, perhaps what are needed are moderated, interactive forums that make room for nuance, enabling citizens to identify what needs fixing before applying their gifts and talents to the job.

On Supports

I believe one reason movements celebrating childlikeness have avoided corporate capture even in recent years is that childlikeness itself is a sort of immune system, and, with all of the discussion as political tables turn of a need for adults in the room, I wonder whether it is time for further definition of this concept.

If three qualities that define childlikeness, for example, (the opposite of childishness) are courage, honesty, and creativity, I wonder whether this could be considered a higher goal and that one defense against an arguably hijacked communications infrastructure could be a resolution by Americans to spend at least as much time every day expressing themselves as they do being impressed by others. (As I have written at length before, I personally believe that this practice of expression need not always – or even most of the time – take the form of pubic opining but, rather, art-making, journaling, dance, or any number of other natural forms of creative expression.)

Despite all the recent talk about how it was that Americans made such a surprising presidential selection in 2016, I still wonder whether these were not votes for the full suite (or even a small portion) of the Republican party’s policies but, rather, against an arguably cancerous journalism sector business model. (I believe, too, that President Biden’s approval ratings may have at least as much to do with dissatisfaction with the journalism industry’s involvement in our most recent election as they have to do with him.)

If the definition of an oligarch is a person whose career subtracts overall value from the world, might not a good definition of a real citizen be a person who at least tries to add value by cultivating childlikeness (regardless of how often she or he fails)? I still believe that, by being willing to confront bullying, anyone can join a growing movement that can help end the practice and, perhaps – finally – be part of a contingent that cannot be bought.

(If two of the central aspects of childlikeness needed are an ability to think creatively and stand up to bullies, I incidentally believe the world could possibly do worse than a takeover of Twitter by an ingenius engineer dealing with the challenge of a seemingly monolithic and apparently almost omnipotent corporate media machine.)

On Landings

While the privatization of a social media company may be helpful, I still do not believe it will completely solve the problem of an unaccountable corporate journalism sector (and closely allied nonprofit journalism sector). Although I proposed one education sector-based solution in 2016 that I felt was aggressively silenced, another option, should the first idea, any billionaire’s involvement, or any one of what could be many other options prove incorrect, could simply be to talk more openly about how to deal with the problem of the directness of journalism corporations’ relationship to the stock market.

Today’s Washington Post opined “Elon Musk’s ‘free speech’ takeover part of new corporate activism wave.” But from where did this wave arise? Did it have anything to do with the point raised that organizations that put profit ahead of their constitutional responsibilities should perhaps lose the ability to trade stock? Did this have anything to do with a media sector that, made well-aware of this point, changed its, at least outward, mode of operations almost entirely without acknowledgment? How did corruption take hold of media organizations on such a large scale in the first place?

If it’s true that the central challenge of our time is to disentangle the problems of an improperly dominant media sector and a need for more nuanced debate about social and economic matters, might not the time be coming when better designed forums are needed?

I believe one indication that this time may indeed be near is the aggression with which media companies have seemed to silence meaningful stories and ideas. While the writing was on the wall during the women’s movement that news corporations would co-opt another social justice movement in order to prevent women’s solutions from being heard, I am not sure anyone imagined that even nonprofit news organizations would participate as silencers. But, one may argue that, as media outlets proliferated and their collective influence grew in arguably improper ways relative to the scale of the normal apparatus of American government in recent years, it seems leaders of these organizations either couldn’t or wouldn’t resist the temptation to, effectively, cartelize, helping explain the reticence of even non-profit media organizations to do their jobs in articulating an obvious problem.

While one argument against a reform by which deeper engagement on matters of public interest could be made possible seems to be that such change might signal a reversion to populism, simply articulating that the media sector should not govern America free from accountability to the country’s citizenry or government is not populism at all.

Our Constitution actually protects against populism, or, the tyranny of the majority; and I believe our hope should be to restore the spirit of the form of representative – or, tempered – democracy it founded. I believe one step we must take toward this end is to talk about the fact that our Constitution did not protect against the potential collective influence of stock-trading and tech-enabled journalism corporations, or what could be termed the tyranny of Wall Street and Silicon Valley-powered media. Because it couldn’t. The risk of failing to do so would be to devolve from a representative, to what I still believe may better be termed a symbolic, democracy.

It is comforting to consider that, the more opposition there is to progress, the more inevitable progress may be. Perhaps, through reversal, one could consider feelings associated with having been left out or dropped onto what may feel like a new level less like a crash landing and maybe more like a resting place on a journey upward.

On Stars

John Dunne said “no man is an island … if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.” John Dewey wrote “mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth.”

I have written at length before about a wondering whether the defining characteristic of a modernized communications infrastructure and even a new era will be an opportunity for more than only extraverts and bullies to be heard.

While their contributions are certainly well-intentioned and in many ways very helpful, it has felt a little bit discouraging, where there had seemed to be a place for new voices and perspectives to be heard, to see celebrities of past decades dominating airwaves again in new ways instead in recent months.

If it is true that creativity is needed in order to tackle many of the world’s problems, should it not be considered that many creative people are introverted and account for this?

While I do not know whether my experience resembles others’, after working for the Larry King Live team, wondering whether the media sector could ever be reformed, and then feeling unacknowledged when attempting to talk about both problems and solutions, I have encountered significant hardship. More importantly, I have felt ideas born of both my creativity and my experience have gone unheard.

While corporate media laughs all the way to the bank, I do sometimes wonder, just as individuals can be held in contempt of court, shouldn’t neglectful media corporations, at least potentially, be held in contempt of country?