NEWSBEE
CityVP Manjit
Newsbee is my latest learning hive. It was called "Selling" but the idea that I can get better at a practice by reading about it is one flaw in the original learning objective, but today as a violent act in Barcelona played out, I also asked myself where learning to sell is in my priorities, when the actions that groups take depends on what they are sold on, and the news coming out of Barcelona showed the negative side of a group trying to sell violence to its constituency.
While events may be a unique to the news cycle, the subject of news has a pattern and the reaction to these news cycles also follows a pattern and then when we throw in social custom into this mix, the way we receive news also has a pattern to it. To break that pattern it is important to know how news effects us personally and whether these effects are solely our choice or whether external agencies have some form of design attached to that effect.
It turns out that I am not the only one who has questioned these patterns, and my questioning pertains to my relationship with news. After today I realized that watching news the way I have watched it to date is a relationship with someone selling me something and not a relationship with intelligence. Even with huge breaking stories like the Barcelona story earlier this afternoon is curated in a certain way, and it is a way not to far removed from how Vox question it in their video "This is your brain on terrorism" :
So changing the "Selling" hive to "Newsbee" is not about relaying the news as I have seen it, but writing down what I thought or think I have seen and then AFTERWARDS try to understand how it is that I watch news. News is not a fact based machine, it is an opinion generator and news is akin to history, in that history can be re-written and also changes with perspective and time.
The interesting thing in the next clip is not the content of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies but that on the topic of "Terrorism and the Media - Dilemma's for Government, Media and the Public" beyond the small number of views, is no comments. Whether there is a crisis in journalism today is for journalist's to figure out, but that I have not examined my own consumption of news, other than recognizing context, bias, education, expertise etc all contribute to how we understand or even choose the news we watch. This video also shows how difficult such a conversation is because it takes nearly 22 minutes just to introduce a panel.
If I have two hours to go through this video I might do so for curiosity, but the value of it for me is that if news was like this, no one would watch it - and so it bears out what the VOX video says that some of the most constructive things we can learn are actually dirt boring to us. So the ultimate value of the Potomac Institute video is making it a bookmark for how this exercise of "Newsbee" may have on me - because the sooner I watch this with "interest", the sooner it is an acid test of transformation of how I personally consume and pursue news.
Realistically very few people should watch a debate that goes on for nearly 2 hours without some insight into what the subject matter is going to cover and with the time passing 10:30pm as I write this, this also answers a key part to the news question - just because the media we find is available to access, why should availability be the criteria for choosing to watch that media. With modern news it has none of the academic quality that generations weened on marketing have been used to. Here a two minute skit by two gentleman from Australia was well worth my time today and while the funniest bit is how they talk about devices and divisive, it takes sufficient pot-shots at news media, that nearly all of us don't bother with, when the news is "must-watch" - though the must-watch is really its entertainment and not insight value.
When I think of great news people, why is it that it takes me back to a time of black and white footage, and in this case it is more than the The Vast Wasteland speech by Newton Minnow, but also the movie that George Clooney made about the life of Edward R. Murrow - and the following clip from his movie "Good Night, Good Luck" is very pertinent in that questioning news was not something we are doing because millennials are questioning it, it was questioned by its greatest reporters also - and thus I find the Murrow speech acted out in Clooney's movie to be relevant.
There is a middle ground between journalists talking media in an academic setting for a couple of hours and the BREAKING NEWS that keeps breaking when news media become vultures trying to get ahead of story that is generating mega-ratings. It is a middle ground that I have not so far found, because even though I may talk about the conditioned effects of marketing and news media, it is also clear to me that, just unlike selling, documenting our own news watching can itself provide us with insights that we will be blind to, because our attention is saturated in moments that ignite our mirror neurons and amygdala.
It is when news is touching us at our emotional center, that we are also at points that may get defined as "historic moments". It is no different to there being an solar eclipse event due where I live on Monday at 1pm - watching the news is like watching that solar eclipse - even though I can rationalize it as the moon simply casting a shadow in front of the sun, no amount of rationalization will stop us from venturing outside at that time to experience a brief moment of darkness - because it feels historic and we have heard that it is a once in 90 year event. We may even directly look at the sun during this event even if we are told that it is not safe to do so - and that is what we are like with shocking news - we are drawn to it like moths to a flame - or at least that zap machine which produces an intoxicating blue light for mosquitoes. If I can master how to handle such news, I may find new ways of processing information and handling insight. I may end up improving the very quality of my own attention - and that is a good newsbee to be.
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