The news has become intolerable and inhumane. Democracy’s vital feedback mechanism is broken

It is little wonder that people are turning off the news in record numbers. The images are often unwatchable, the descriptions beyond imagining, the scale incomprehensible.

Everywhere you look the cruelty of the human spirit is on display.

The news has become intolerable and inhumane. Democracy’s vital feedback mechanism is broken

This article is more than 1 year old

BY Julianne Schultz

Newsreaders have adjusted their scripts. They used to say, “Some viewers might find the next item distressing.” Now it is an unequivocal declaration. “The images are distressing.” They could use other words and still not capture the enormity of what is cascading day after day into the living rooms and on to the screens of those who have not yet opted to turn off. Confronting. Intolerable. Inhumane. Unforgivable.

The words offer no respite. The cries of those touched by the horror of 7 October and the weeks of reprisals are heartbreaking.

Instead, in bulletin after bulletin, screen after screen, it shows the extent of our powerlessness. A third of the population globally actively avoids it, the number of people interested in the news continues to fall.

Information was supposed to make us powerful, but democracy’s essential feedback mechanism has broken. Traditional media lost trust first, but other forms are quickly catching up.

Candlelight vigils and mass rallies offer solidarity, but hate is in the air. Its poison has been on display all year, with unprecedented increases in reports of racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism.

In Australia as public utterances about the Indigenous voice to parliament became less conciliatory, angrier, more dogmatic, they became news.

The more proponents of the modest constitutional reform talked about love, compassion and empathy, the more hearts hardened. Images of the consequences of generations of harsh policies on the lives of Australia’s first peoples did not touch the majority. Hard hearts wrapped in a carapace of self-interest were impervious.

Maybe that is the key to personal success for some, but it is a poor foundation for collective wellbeing.

Palestinians displaced and dispossessed in the Nakba that followed the establishment of the state of Israel held a faint hope that if more people could have seen what was happening there may have been a different outcome. The Palestinian Authority representative at the UN security council last week gave up on that imagining. Seeing is not enough. Another lost generation has been created.

The institutions that grew out of the postwar settlement and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have demonstrated their limits. Some still regard other people as sub-human.

The media’s hunger for conflict can be a zero-sum game with many losers. Pursuing the absolutes of populism strips politics of its rationale, to find middle ground.

But if information is not empowering, silence is worse.

Australia conducted a giant multi-generational national experiment with silence.

At the moment of federation, the reports that had once dominated the press about the killings and mistreatment of Aboriginal people in what was known as “the land of newspapers”, became invisible. As David Marr documented in Killing for Country, the new nation chose to believe its existence represented a quiet victory over a dying race.

The great Australian experiment with silence then took other forms. Things became unsayable – “don’t talk about religion or politics” a national mantra. Soldiers returned from wars unable to speak of the horrors they had witnessed. An extraordinary number of books, magazines and even songs were banned and censored until the 1970s. The millions of new arrivals who arrived after 1945 were told clearly that to be a new Australian they must forget the past.

Many were happy to do, to leave the trauma and memory of poverty and threat behind.

But much as we try, humans are not good at forgetting. Things come back to haunt. Trauma lives on in the body and shapes the future and constrains possibilities. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” DH Lawrence once wrote.

Judy Atkinson, emeritus professor at Southern Cross university, has traced the living trails of trauma in the lives of Australia’s First Peoples. She has developed ways to help cauterise it. But trauma’s legacy runs deep and is renewed generation after generation. No doubt there are little children who watched the referendum closely and observed its outcome with dismay who will carry this rejection with them for life.

“There is an anger across this nation that we choose not to acknowledge,” Atkinson said in a Ted Talk in 2017. “It is an anger fuelled by racism, prejudice, discrimination and poverty. A distressed discontent that is growing, not just here but around the world. But under anger there is always grief.”

Her solution is to accept the gift of deep listening one by one, in families and communities, that is essential to First Nations ways of being, doing and seeing.

This can work for us all. It is the antithesis of the modern media that people are turning off in such numbers.

An angry world defined by political absolutes is ill-prepared for this approach, but it is what we need.

 Julianne Schultz is the author of The Idea of Australia: a search for the soul of the nation

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/19/the-news-has-become-intolerable-and-inhumane-democracys-vital-feedback-mechanism-is-broken

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

THIS ISN'T NEW TO US... IT IS HARD TO KNOW (IT IS NOT HARD TO KNOW) WHERE THIS IS COMING FROM... WE ARE CONFLICTED ANIMALS AND WE ARE DOING WHAT WE CAN TO SURVIVE IN COMPLEXED STYLISTIC SYSTEMS, HOLDING ON TO THE SHRED OF BELIEFS WE GREW UP WITH.

WE TRY HARD TO REJECT ANY INFORMATION THAT COULD CONTRADICT THIS FRAGILE SET OF VALUES, WHILE WE LET MOST POWERFUL PSYCHOPATHS BECOME THE PROTECTORS OF OUR WOLF PACK.

NO-ONE WOULD BE PREPARED TO LEAD, UNLESS ONE HAD THE HUNGER TO BITE OTHERS. THIS HAS BEEN ALL OUR GOVERNMENTS USING MANY VICIOUS DISTRACTIONS WE HAVE CALLED HISTORY AS IT MOVES ON.

REMEMBERING BACKWARDS, WE SLIDE FROM THE LATEST MASS MURDERS IN GAZA, BACK TO WORLD WAR TWO, MOVING BACK STEP BY STEP THROUGH THE EUROPEAN WARS OF RELIGION, THE MURDER OF JULIUS CAESAR AND SO FAR BACK...

THE EVENTS WE REMEMBER WERE CREATED IN DECEIT, FALSEHOODS, LIES, AGGRESSION AND CONSPIRACIES. 

IT'S NORMAL. THE NEWSREADERS OF DOOM HAVE REPLACED THE PREACHERS WARNING US OF ARMAGEDDON FROM THE PULPITS.

OUR DISCREET PREDILECTION FOR VOYEURISM OF THE DISTRESS OF OTHERS — THE SINNERS AND THE BOMBED — IS CULTIVATED BY THESE SNAKE OIL MERCHANTS (NEWS-PROVIDERS AND PRIESTS) TO MAKE SURE WE BEHAVE IN ACCORDANCE TO THE LAW OF WHOMEVER DECIDES, OTHERWISE OUR TRANQUILITY WILL BE DESTROYED.

WE WATCH IN ORDER NOT TO GO TO HELL... IT'S THE POWER OF THE NEWS. 

AS WELL, WE CANNOT BE SAD OR STRESSED OR FEARFUL ALL THE TIME.

WE ACCEPT OUR LAUGHTER AND OUR SERENITY THOUGH WE SEE THE DISTRESS OF OTHERS FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR, FINDING WAYS TO EXPLAIN OUR ATTITUDES OF NOT SHARING THEIR PAIN.

WE VOTE AGAINST THEIR PAIN.

WE COULD SEE SUCH PAIN AND DEATHS AS WARNINGS AGAINST DOING "SOMETHING WRONG" TO MAKE SURE WE CULTIVATE AND DO NOT SHARE MUCH OF OUR GOOD LUCK.

MEANWHILE THE NEWS — PEPPERED WITH ADVERTISING FOR PILLS, CARS AND WASHING POWDERS, ALL WITHOUT BLINKING — MOVES ON TO SPORT, CULTURAL AMUSEMENTS AND THE WEATHER — AFTER AN OBLIGATO DETOUR VIA THE "FINANCE" SEGMENT, WHICH MEASURE THE LEVEL OF HAPPINESS OR BUTT TIGHTENING WE SHOULD FEEL IN RELATION TO OUR BANK ACCOUNT(S) ON THIS DAY...

MEANWHILE THE INFORMATION AGENCIES OF MOST GOVERNMENTS SPREAD DISINFORMATION LIKE BUTTER ON TOAST. UNFORTUNATELY, THE TRUMP GOVERNMENT IN ITS PSYCHOPATHIC MADNESS DECIDED TO TELL US THE TRUTH... MOST OF IT ANYWAY... THE LEGACY MEDIA ARE IN A PANIC MODE. THE PULPITS ARE CRUMBLING....

G.L.