I KEEP six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who. —Rudyard Kipling
Once upon a time, and it does seem like a land far, far away, we had newspapers. These were delivered to our homes either in the morning or evening and provided many a paperboy with his or her first job.
Inside the newspaper, which you picked up from wherever it landed on your lawn, flower bed, sidewalk or sometimes even the porch, were printed adverts for local stores intermingled with vacation ideas in faraway locations most of us would never be able to visit.
Tucked away between all this welcome entertainment was something we rarely see today. These were called news stories. These stories were the work products of Kipling’s six honest serving-men. Or as detective Joe Friday would later implore in the long-running “Dragnet” television series, “Just the facts, Ma’am.”
In our present society, which is a product of the rabid mouse click, delivered moment by moment by the rodent that makes today’s world go around, news stories have become nearly extinct, certainly clinically dead, or at least they’ve entered a vegetative state and are dependent on life support for further existence.
Newspaper stories used to be written to no more than a sixth-grade level, so that most readers could easily understand them. Today, a sixth-grade reading level, even a dumbed down one, is unattainable by many high school graduates. Will the public education unions and their armies of social activists ever be sued for fraud?
Let’s be charitable and say that most social media postings are written to a third-grade level. Is that adequate to explain the news events in the world to another person?
If you can’t explain the news to others, however, maybe you can still tell them what to think about it? And isn’t that the real point of understanding a particular news story? So the person you are talking to will know what to think about the information?
Of course, if someone gives you the facts, you can come to your own understanding of what those facts mean to you. But if someone else weaves a few facts in with a lot of his or her opinion of what it means, well, you are being brainwashed, aren’t you?
The facts, you see, don’t matter to our political and media elites. All that matters is what you think of those facts. Why? Because what you think about the day’s events, day after day after day, will shape how you vote in the next election. And in the end, that’s all they care about: shaping your opinion for the next election, so they can remain in power and continue to run the world the way they see fit.
In fact, the fewer facts they have to give you, the easier it is for them to carry out their governing agenda, as opposed to your governing agenda.
Yes, we live in the age of managed outrage, news blended into a puree of daily outrage to guide you through those pesky election ballots.
Finally, let me say that I sincerely hope none of this is news to you.
Dispatches across Eternity, craigemcmillan.com
