– Recently, the Guardian Newspaper, which I read, asked its readership what it should be doing. The occasion of asking was the posting of a new editor-in-chief there. I wrote them the following:
– dennis
= = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What’s missing in today’s news is a sense that it is unbiased. The very fact that the Guardian seems to report a number of stories that fly in the face of how the powers that be would like to see the world explained to the average man, speaks well of the paper’s independence.
But left open are still the questions of (1) whether or not you are simply recognizing an under-served part of the market and serving it. (2) whether you are focusing on a type of sensationalism that works because it goes against the grain or (3) you are actually trying to report the news in an unbiased manner because that is what best serves all of us.
Many of us perceive your reporting as arising from motive (3). If that is so, you need to recognize that this is what makes you special and you need to accentuate it, defend it and promote it. But most of all, you need to really do it by walking your talk in everything you do. Build your brand on it.
In a world where the reader can trust nothing they read in the media because it all seems to be shrouded in spin serving various factions, the reader will simply give up and society’s self-awareness will fragment and dim.
Humanity does have a right to clear, unambiguous information about the state of the world. And we have this right whether or not is it codified anywhere. People who speak the truth, in spite of the peril it costs them, know this instinctively. And those of us who align ourselves with the good of all, rather than the personal good of the few, recognize such truth-speaking as heroism and as being the best of us.
Be that paper and be it with a vengeance.