I complained about the media...

... and labeled it a bit of a monster I fear more – as negatively impactful to M 'n' m and our collective future – than even politics. In doing so, it felt like saying I feared the mouse more than the elephant. And then the prescience of that analogy hit me – I don't mean to sound arrogant, by the way, as I think and write very simply, I'm afraid, and only stumble onto anything meaningful by accident – but isn't it the mouse that causes the elephant to stampede and crush everything? In four decades of living, I've sensed and observed political swings, seemingly calamitous, irreparable, scary at the time (to one side or the other), and in fairly short order they lose energy and stall, and then we have a counter-swing. It's a comforting pendulum to me. Maybe someday the pivot point will break, and our so-called pendulum will devastatingly fly away and not come back ... but I have yet to see it. The media, on the other hand, has metamorphosed into something unable to check its own over-tentacled power – as, theoretically, the different branches of government do for each other. (An ingenious construction, by the way; many thanks to our founding fathers.) In a discussion between Tim Ferriss and Krista Tippett, two minds I've learned much from, this was said, and it highlights a primary problem:

When (interviewers) are going for revelation, it's often in the form of making their questions sound tough; it's about how they sound and how they present, and we actually reward and laud interviewers who push their subjects into corners and embarrass them, who put people on the defensive, and then they strike out, and then that creates the conversation we talk about. I think that rarely accomplishes anything aside from something entertaining, something that demeans both sides of the conversation and demeans us by enjoying it. — Krista Tippett

Brilliantly explained, but true and sad. What is the media, the press, if not a kind of official interviewer and fact-gatherer for society, whose work we rapaciously consume and believe? Or we used to believe it anyway; polls show fewer people than ever – less than a third – trust the media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly." I wish network news was news again, not entertainment, and certainly not a self-important 24-hour pursuit of further divisiveness, intolerance, and conflict in a world that has enough of those things already. 'Bad news' has its place and importance. But creating it crosses the line for me. The news itself is now the news, and it's not useful, meaningful, or truthful; it's just bad bullshit.