An Opinion

I thought that a piece written by Mitch Potter in the Toronto Star this weekend was spot on:  Tragic Cleveland Saga Often Descended into Voyeuristic Media Farce Driven by Vanity. In it, he refers to a "self-incriminating screed" by CBS News anchor Scott Pelley.

In Potter's words, the 'screed' summed it all up:

...adding up the mountain of mistakes, from the massacre in Newtown to the bombings in Boston to Cleveland, as evidence that journalism’s house is on fire.

“We’re getting the big stories wrong over and over again,” said Pelley.

He railed against “vanity” and “self-conceit,” as the drivers of a real-time scramble to be first with any new crumb of information, often lifted without scrutiny from the uncorroborated pages of social media.

Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, said Pelley, are “not journalism. That’s gossip. Journalism was invented as an antidote to gossip.”

It’s “a world where everybody is a publisher, no one is an editor, and we’ve arrived at that point today.”

Like I said, spot on.

I know a lot of intelligent people are sounding the alarm bells even as this plays out around us. But I can't tell if their message is being heard amidst the din on the web.

To whom should we listen?

Where do you go to find a good old fashioned expert opinion on something these days? Way back in the previous century, if you wanted to get an opinion on a movie, you sought out one of a handful of reputable movie critics. If you needed news, it was in the newspapers and TV news reports. If you wanted medical advice, you asked your doctor. And while the weather was always a 50/50 proposition, you at least knew where to look.

I think that those of us who grew up in that world still make the extra effort to find our own cadre of experts...but what about our children? To whom are they listening? Each other?

Who should listen to 'me'?

It used to be that the first 30 (or so) years of your life were an extended training period during which you were being carefully groomed to take your turn contributing something back to society. If you had something to say, you'd get a chance to say it once you had paid your dues. When you first entered the workforce, you spent years paying attention to the experienced folks around you and learning from them. Every now and then, they'd ask your opinion.

If you were much younger than that and you had an opinion about a world event, or poverty, or climate change, or... you would feel free to share that opinion with the people in your immediate vicinity. When you went off to University, you might have worked for the paper or the radio station and been in a position to share your opinions with a broader spectrum of people who were within your local sphere of influence.

Today, EVERYBODY can say ANYTHING about ANYTHING to EVERYBODY else. No editors. No credentials. Few rules. No age restrictions. No consequences. 

So we have people barely starting out in life who feel free to speak with authority on subjects about which they know very little. They are also making mistakes that will haunt them forever because long before they've had the opportunity to develop any kind of wisdom, they are out showing their face and sharing their thoughts in front of the world.

And with so many people contributing to the din in real time on every subject imaginable, there are no experts. Our trusted institutions are crumbling. And people's lives are being ruined.

Lives are being ruined

It used to be that the mistakes you made during your volatile formative years were your own mistakes, and they made you wiser. But now it's dead easy to make those mistakes in front of everyone and never ever live them down. 

It's also dead easy to take aim at someone else and destroy them. In fact, there are a small number of people who see this as a game and know how to play it very well.

So?

Society has had its "wild frontiers" before, and we always tame those frontiers by - amongst other things - establishing some rules that allow us to live together. This is what's got to be next.

In the meantime, I think we can all act a little more responsibly while the frontier is being tamed. My opinion:

• Don't just share everything you see or hear. Don't try to make yourself part of a breaking news story. Don't weigh in on things just because you can. 
• Continue (or start) supporting real journalism by buying newspapers, subscribing to news sites, etc.
• Have grown up conversations with your kids about what's going on out there. At first, we were just worried about our kids being targeted by bad people online for an eventual face-to-face encounter. Now, we should be just as worried about their 'information' encounters online. As it says in the Star article I mentioned above, try to emphasize the ethics that are under siege.
• If you're young, be okay with listening to your elders on matters they understand better than you do. Believe it or not, there is some value in experience.

In case you've noticed the irony of me writing this blog post as if I'm some kind of expert, let me just say that I'm not. And I don't think I'm pretending to be. I also don't think that I have any greater right to share my opinion than anyone else does.

My opinion isn't news and it isn't fact and there's every chance it's not even right. If you don't know me, you have no reason to believe me. But for the family, friends and work colleagues who do know me, you now know my thoughts on this matter. I'd be interested in your thoughts as well. And isn't that how it should be?