A few days ago I saw a video documenting the destruction of an Asian food restaurant that had, devastatingly, trafficked in animals normally considered pets. While I cheered, obviously, and I also felt heartened that the restaurant’s owner participated in the demolition, I took pause at what at least seemed to be the storytellers’ omission of any information about his future plans.

Certainly, there is no shortage of ways in which a person can make a living without harming other beings; but I still wonder whether a need persists to help ensure this understanding is known and reinforced in order to ensure it is put in practice when video cameras are no longer rolling.

As has been a theme of this blog, based on the theory that true creativity is the opposite of what could be termed carnivorousness, predation, or slavery, it may be by accentuating the practice of the former, alongside the eradication, or phasing out, of the latter that progress can be made more durable.

On Black Boxes

During the first months after I gave my notice at CNN, I remember taking stock of both what I valued and what I had to offer in considering what to do next. And I remember feeling surprised at how narrow, on a close look at many non-profit and academic job requirements, my experience really had been. I had come from one of the most influential organizations involved in some of the most consequential public affairs dialogues in the world; but had my work, basically, just boiled down to marketing, I wondered? And, if so, on what basis has modern media corporation dominance arisen?

I believe that, assuming I am correct that this dominance is a problem, it stems from a failure to consider inputs as opposed to the outputs of ratings, advertiser revenue, and what is still certainly some measure of helpful programming, only.

When inputs are considered, as I have written before, I believe it becomes obvious that systematic harms to women and girls (particularly given all of the gifts and talents each come to the world to develop and share) within news organizations are not worth it, no matter how many bottles of laundry detergent, or other consumer products, end up getting sold – nor how much organizational power is accumulated. It is through failure to acknowledge this, I believe, that even though many publicly-traded media organizations do often showcase valuable products, these organizations still seem to tend to subtract such enormous overall value from the world, all things considered.

The attribute of black boxes most appealing to predatory forces is their imprecision. If it is true that the primary purpose of the stock market, generally, is to create a sort of black box within which profit can be made with minimal accountability for harms perpetrated against people or planet, even while corporations spend enormous sums on marketing and image-crafting, would not its operations create a greater – and not a lesser – need for journalism in America? At the very least, should we not decide, sooner rather than later, that American media organizations’ relationship to the stock market is problematic and open a dialogue about how this may most sensibly and helpfully be addressed?

It felt (and still feels) to me as if CNN’s (and many other news organizations’) theory has been that the abuse of women and girls for the purpose of boosting executive confidence is fine so long as they are able to avoid acknowledging it.

I was heartened, to say the least, to read today about new plans a leading car company has shared to produce vehicles powered by air and water alone and whose net emissions are, essentially, zero. Planes have, too, been developed that do the same.

But for all of the vital discussion and innovation aiming to conserve and optimize the use of such materials today, our most valuable resources, both within organizations and without, continue to be inward and include creativity, caring, and attention itself.

This is one reason it’s arguably just as important to, when possible, eschew soap news as soap operas.

And Batteries

I marveled at the beauty of a Peabody Institute music library today and considered how much infrastructure our country already has in place to cultivate and encourage the practice of creativity. If it is true, as I have posited, that the only fuel that can keep a ratings-based and stock trading corporate media ruling model in place is American insecurity, might not the more persistent pursuit of creative endeavors help eradicate it?

I do not believe that a constant rebalancing of power between democratic and republican leaders is enough to counter this problem, assuming I have been correct in identifying it, without – hopefully together – addressing it head-on. This is as a country that so anxiously paces back and forth as ours has done for decades now may not really be one grappling with either capriciousness or ambivalence but, rather, a desire to get out of its cage.

I still love the way that modern academic definitions of creativity require that it be effective (and authentic and novel) in order to count. A pretty picture or catchy tune, in other words, does not constitute creativity. True creativity changes the world.

While I realize international affairs today are complex (and I still wonder whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could potentially have been averted if fewer people listened to media pundits advocating for the evacuation of all, rather than almost all, residual American forces in Afghanistan, especially after hearing Condoleezza Rice underscore the point so eloquently this autumn), I wonder, too, whether it was because Volodymyr Zelenskiy practiced creativity in his earlier career, that he intuitively felt authorized to stand against carnivorousness in the hectic moments during which a foreign onslaught was initiated.

Modern resistance to dialogues confronting journalism company business models is arguably meant not to make the country – or world – more just, but to solidify such a patently un-American corporate media ruling system that it would impose senseless and harmful inequities for no other reason than to slow the phase-out of predatory forces in social, political, and economic life and avoid the need to practice creativity. But these forces need to be phased out as, unlike the next generation of car emission systems described in the news this week, people, when operating creatively, can actually add enormous value to the world.

On Outputs

Tonight being, supposedly, the longest of the year, I am hoping that the future will soon get brighter in more than only a literal sense.

It has been discouraging to consider how resistant to change our media ecosystem has proven to be.

But, much more than to articulate a belief that media corporations that maximize reputation over actual good done while insisting on staking claim to the lion’s share of Americans’ attention stand to do considerable harm to the world, a hope of this blog has been to emphasize that there is an alternative to their approach.

This is, as in aviation, some black boxes can be understood and learned from.

In a period requiring equal opportunity to participate in problem-solving, carnivorousness with regard to voice would be particularly important to identify. This has arguably been almost as problematic when Hollywood has co-opted the voices of women speaking up as part of the women’s movement in journalism as when those women were silenced to begin with. But it applies to Americans at large, too.

This month, the Democratic party announced an intention to reconfigure its presidential nomination primary schedule to make South Carolina first. But we are arguably on course to make reality television stardom the real gateway to American politics in an, I believe, devastatingly ongoing trend.

But we do not need financially-incented reality TV producers to design our governmental systems.

Recent movements to empower women and people of color are essential, certainly. And people need to be protected on the basis of both race and gender, especially where abuses on these bases have tended to run most rampant – namely, organizations and sectors that have managed to design accountability out of their operating models.

But in a country of thinkers increasingly dominated by corporate media, there is another characteristic that is, arguably, far more aggressively targeted, maligned and, tragically, outcast today:

Independence.

So, what is the answer?

When an individual resists letting go of an abusive relationship, it is often out of a sense of fear that, by relying on the practice of creativity or simply by following their own intuition, rather than seeing another person as their source, they will somehow lose something.

They are afraid of the truth, but they are wrong. A person would not be alive if they were not capable of independent thinking and God-directed fulfillment. The truth, in other words, empowers them.

When a media corporation resists letting go of an abusive relationship the opposite is true. They seem afraid of the truth, and they would be right to be so. Their existence is arguably dependent on lies and the truth dis-empowers them. Therefore the remedy to their dominance is arguably not simply to inform them, but to inform people capable of holding them accountable.

As I have written before, this is the reason that, while it should always apply to people, I do not believe the golden rule should apply to corporations. As scaffolding, it still feels important to acknowledge that media corporations have certainly served an enormously valuable purpose in the past, but what if their business models are short-circuiting progress today?

Should we not discuss it?

How can we design a system that maximizes both opportunity for interconnectedness and independent thinking?

I still believe the listening agency would be worth considering.

^{(Article page thumbnail photograph from Patrick Gillespie)}