Miss Information 2023

 

Yip, yip that's what it is

 

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Why we don't trust mainstream media and governments

I really cant stand billboards adorning school frontages these days -you know, the ones that say things like We Stand for Respect, Striving, Perseverance etc. It must be what Winston Peters calls virtue signalling, as I don't believe it is advertising the school. It reminds me of the symbolic memes of trees with a trunk and a round top like an ice cream which is standard issue in schools classroom wall art. Nothing original or necessarily representative; just a meme. In the same way I am suddenly reminded of mainstream/legacy media forever trumpeting their values of fairness and balance and representing minority views, when none of them have been there in many years, especially in the last three years.

Last week the media itself was asking (me? the public?) why they aren't trusted anymore; why their position as trustworthy news sources is being eroded. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018793371/we-ve-got-trust-issues-with-news In the recent spate of articles, and in the one linked above, many answers are put forward. Much of them second guesses. Greg Treadwell and Mertja Millilahti from AUT Centre for Journalism and Democracy offered some research, and some best guesses. 

What surprises me is that nowhere does anyone ask "Well, are the media worthy of trust?" and if not, how could they become, to quote the Journalist's code of ethics, more fair and balanced and telling the other side of a story? The focus seems to be on the listeners/consumers as if they just need to see that the media is trustworthy. My answer to the question is no, they are not trustworthy. Reason? They became, wittingly or unwittingly, the hosts of viral one-sided biased information about  what are called vaccines (but aren't even vaccines, they don't work like vaccines-more sloppy journalism?). They forgot who they were, and took up a cause. Many people I know were well aware of media's bias decades before our recent Covid conflict. Jim Lyons, a Catholic priest, showed it to me in a workshop in 1986. Everyone has a 'bias'-you can't not. To suggest neutrality and objectivity is, you could say, spreading misinformation. 

But what we are talking about here is something else. I believe the (mainstream media) is purposefully biased.

I wrote to RNZ and Stuff many times over the past 2 years about their biased reporting during the pandemic lockdown and protest and they flatly denied  every complaint. Jessie Mulligan scoffed at people who chose not to get RNA injected. I was somewhat a fan. Many of us wont go back to the 'trusted' media we used to tune into.

What could be done to reinstate trust? Meet with us. Listen to the suffering  we endured for making a personal choice, a choice that was upheld by The Bill of Rights and Human Rights charter. Show and tell like you once did. Poignantly, this was not offered as a way to regain trust in the article or any of the others I could find. 

You will notice the frenzy of media activity recently about 'misinformation and disinformation'. A year ago I had to  find out what they meant and decipher the difference.  So it appears, and the Ardern government said so, that any views contrary to the government's on Covid are to be considered conspiracy theories. How did this happen? How did we get to here? Did we not learn from the constitution makers in democracies around the globe that governments are to be treated with caution, for good reason and a thousand historical precedents of wild caucuses coming up with ideologies which end up persecuting minorities and sometimes majorities? So now we have a government body set up to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Whatever happened to the recognition of our ability to decide for ourselves the course and direction of our lives and the veracity or not of the information out there? It is demeaning to our own value compass and sensibility to say we cant decide for ourselves. I would like to decide for myself who I listen to, visit with, read books by, attend to talks by, and put into my body. Oh but they say, it's the people who don't possess this discernment we have to worry about; the lonely outsiders with a big grudge, Couldn't we make a government body that gathers these folks into community that they crave instead of a government body that monitors and judges everyone? That stops terrorists, not censoring every dissenting voice.

When I was growing up we knew who the town bull-shitters were, the people you couldn't trust. We even knew who the local pedos were and where they were likely to be. Which brings me to full circle; a repeat performance of Covid passports time- telling us what to do and when to do it. "Simon says Stand up!" Simon says sit down!" Beyond criminal activity (for which we have the police), there is no need to bring in a kind of Morality Police to decide on what people can be exposed to; who can speak and who can't.

One of the coolest things that came out of lockdowns was that it gave us time and space to consider and feel what we wanted and what we did not want. From what I've gathered we want a more balanced life in terms of work and family, and play and time to follow our passions and interests. We want and need human connection; touch. Autonomy and agency in plotting the course of our lives. It was as if a giant bear came out of hibernation and it was angry and hungry, lonely and scared. The bear was us- hungry for what it needed and angry that it had been in a deep sleep for so long.

It is not just the in the media that are losing our trust. It's every institution. And it is world wide apparently. Could it be that, and as I've said, this is something these examinations avoid asking, that there is good reason not to trust. ie we have been lied to or had information skewed or left out altogether? Im a cartoonist, and I remember a couple of years back sending a cartoon of the newly elected local mayor Michael Feyen and recently defeated Brendan Duffy to our local newspaper and being told that we don't publish that sort of thing. I and the friends I showed it to thought it was (sort of)finny and not offensive. Here it is:

The difference between media of my day and now is that I can now see and hear every local, every global village hater, rascist, misogynist all at once. Whereas once, pre internet, I couldn't. There are rooms full of them all shouting at once, all wanting to be seen and heard; and we can enter the rooms. In my day it was very much limited to my local geography. We all knew where Snow the Ho was likely to be.

We don't trust the media not because we are conspiracy theorists or anti-vaxxers or anti -government. True they are government funded, and got a mighty fat cheque over lockdown, that makes one suspicious. Or  its because we value truth, honesty, fairness, integrity and balance, most of which are enshrined in the journalist code of ethics. And we aren't finding those values being upheld in mainstream media.

Which brings me back to where I began, with school billboards. If you shout your values across billboards and boardrooms and staffrooms and websites and then fail to live by them, don't be surprised when people don't trust you. Media, the onus is on you buddy.

On a deeper level, we are collectively coming to the realisation that truth is not ever centrally held by one source, be it the Vatican or government. Truth is elusive and evasive. Its private and subjective. This is not a woke liberal chant but a reality. If we share a truth it may be our collective humanity, our values which differ in their importance to each person but remain a stable foundation even if their expression and priority are different. I've mentioned a few in this article. I've never been that hot on 'truth' as if its something immutable. Perhaps, when we say we want truth, we might be pointing to deeper needs such as to trust, honesty and to feel safe.

I want to trust; it is a basic human instinct that helps to bind us to one another. How else to we all get scammed and preyed apon by sales people and others? I tend to trust people at their word and if I'm taken advantage of, lose my trust in them which affects that relationship.