I was reminded recently of the surprise I felt reading a library book not terribly long ago when noting I was, evidently, the first person in the building to turn to one particular passage still sealed by a pair of folded signatures not yet separated. And it actually gave me hope.

Even ideas that have been hidden for a long period are still discoverable, I felt heartened to consider; and that may mean there is still hope for their use.

Of course, in the world of media critique, ideas do not tend to be hidden by accident. In recent years, I have considered the communication of alternatives to establishment media powers to be more like a football game in which, anytime any form of intelligence is expressed, one can expect prominent modern news organizations (even if these have cast themselves as upstarts) to collaborate in as brutal a tackle as they deem needed to prevent citizen voices from being heard.

But, there are also times when ideas go undiscovered in much less unforced errors in which individual citizens may simply succumb to the temptation to let others think for them.

In recent years, I’ve been grateful to have opportunity to recognize some ways in which news coverage is less accurate than I understood even when working in and producing news within the bubbles of large media corporations. Because I happened to be in Baltimore during the unfoldment of a tragic and national news-making local story, I visited the site and felt surprised to say the least to see almost no residents around but, instead, an enormous and dense crowd of media figures packed into roughly one square city block instead. Because there had understandably been considerable unrest, this, of course, rightly received a great deal of attention; but I took pause when one network anchor, who I believe is literally currently paid tens of millions of dollars per year, claimed on television that “Baltimore is burning,” when the statement was obviously rebutted by even a cursory in-person visit.

So often, I find the same mismatch between anchor summaries of press conferences and other attempts at direct-to-citizen communication and the real thing when I actually take time to watch; and particularly as such public figures tend to have access to so much more information of vital interest to the public but which is kept private, I hope more people consider listening to news events for themselves when possible.

So often, answers that seem so hidden and obscure are just under our noses.