Last night I had the most vivid dream. In navigating an evening out to meet a friend and see a movie, I was accompanied by an almost wolf-like German Shepherd who could not see but who I could feel was serving as a sort of guard dog. Every time I prepared to walk to a new destination I needed to alert him to come along and, as gentle and sweet as he was, I also felt a little on edge that he could bite me at any time. As a guard dog, I wonder in hindsight, and given how important I am learning it is to focus on systems rather than on judging people in media, whether he was maybe protecting me from myself and therefore had no need to be aware of anyone or anything but me.

It feels like such a fine line, I’m walking. I love learning more about how important it is to approach challenges from a posture of forgiveness; and, as important as I continue to believe addressing the news establishment’s relationship to the stock market is, I feel it is just as essential to focus on systems rather than judging people.

It still does feel so important to me to speak up about what I believe have been efforts to prevent a public discussion about news corporations’ business models, but I realize it is important to do so only helpfully.

I still feel that what most need to be addressed are pressures that would tempt any one of us from behaving in uncharitable or predatory ways moving forward and, toward this end, another idea I’ve loved exploring is the importance of putting content over form. I feel this is relevant, because, as important as it is to lift up demographic groups historically disadvantaged, it is just as important to talk about why this was ever done in the first place, thereby widening the field of opportunity for everyone rather than simply engaging a corporation-orchestrated of musical chairs where new groups are privileged at the expense of others on an endlessly rotating basis. Otherwise, rather than being undone, so-called “special,” or predator-prey relationships are just rearranged. Of course it was (and continues to be) essential for women’s rights in the media industry to be discussed, but, as I’ve written before, this movement’s emphasis on form, rather than content, seemed to result in there being practically no one to protect women from the false appearance groups like Time’s Up created that the abuse of women in corporate news had been solved even as their founders amassed enormous corporate wealth.

Corporate capture is nothing new, of course; and attempts at its accomplishment – either through intimidation, bribery, or public adulation are arguably equally unkind to its targets. It would not be them, in other words, but the system of governance by corporation itself that’s really to blame. But corporate capture does still seem to remain a major problem.

After so much public discussion recently over transgender women competing in women’s sports, I thought today about a treadmill race at my old gym in which I was giving a guy nearby a run for his money as I think it may have been one of the only times I heard our head coach lose her composure almost totally. MEGAN!!! Take! Him! DOWN!!! I remember her yelling as I kept pace. No one, of course, batted an eyelash, because we all knew how rare it can be for women’s bodies to outrun men’s. I am a supporter of transgender rights, but, increasingly, I feel that current tendencies to overlook the reasons for boundaries around women’s sports are actually another symptom of a larger-scale minimization of women’s rights that has resulted from the corporate cooptation of the women’s movement in corporate news even though men who are not of color do seem to have borne the brunt.

It’s easy, of course, when you are not part of the group getting scapegoated, just to stay quiet about injustice; but I feel refraining from calling out news corporations for blaming many of their business model’s more nefarious effects on the world on any race- or gender-based demographic is wrong.

I love how in her volume End of Death, author Nouk Sanchez asserts “television and mass media contribute greatly to feeding the fearful and unsatisfied ego, playing a major role in keeping us asleep in the ego dream;” and I still feel responsible for addressing this. Ms. Sanches goes on to say “many of us don’t fully realize the damaging influence these subliminal ego messages have on our sense of self,” but I believe many are waking up to the problem.

I remember when a public health official very early in the pandemic made a public announcement trying to dissuade people from believing masks mattered and, detecting that he was lying, thinking to myself it’s worse than I thought and immediately ordering some when I otherwise don’t think I would have.

Tonight I returned to researchers Richard M. Ryan’s and Edward L. Deci’s Self-Determination Theory and what they describe as people’s need for some measure of autonomy in order to feel fulfilled as being informed, at least to a degree, is arguably an inherent component of this requirement. As was the case then, it still seems to me that attempts to control people by suppressing helpful journalism leaves them feeling less like included citizens and more like unwilling subjects who need to fend for themselves.

I know speaking out about corporate news is like walking a tight rope, and I do not pretend to have done so perfectly by any means; but I feel it is still important.