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News Coverage with a Different Flavor

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With the Gilded Age of Trump about to dawn … I’ve become almost desperately eager as a news consumer for some different journalism to leaven the prevailing diet of outraged disgust vying with abject hero-worship.

Those two extremes are dominating national political coverage right now, more dismal evidence for what our still-President Barack Obama decried in his Tuesday farewell speech (accurately, but unorginally for a guy so verbally dextrous) as “our bubbles” where we accept “only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.”   Continue reading “News Coverage with a Different Flavor” »

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Media Counterpoint to Trumpian Values, from UK

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WASHINGTON SLOUCHES TOWARD Inauguration Day like the poet’s rough beast – and yes, I have found myself in the nation’s capital once again.

I’ve mercifully not been covering preparations for the (gilded?) Trump Presidency, but I did complete a journalistic exercise that has its own relevance for our new age.

I’m glad that, unusually, this piece of work is appearing not just in my familiar slot within PBS‘s broadcast Religion and Ethics Newsweekly over the weekend, but also on The PBS Newshour Weekend next week.    Continue reading “Media Counterpoint to Trumpian Values, from UK” »

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Exceptional? A Doubtful Proposition for America’s Media to Probe

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tr-obA PRESIDENT-ELECT STARTS, as he said he would at some point, to act Presidential. In the early hours of Wednesday November 9th Donald J Trump claimed victory and said among other things “We must reclaim our country’s destiny.”

It was a somewhat elevated version of his “Make America Great Again” slogan, stepping up a bit from the 3rd-Grade level vocabulary that has characterized Trump when not sticking to a scripted delivery.   Continue reading “Exceptional? A Doubtful Proposition for America’s Media to Probe” »

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A Media Rarity: Forgiveness Amid Horror at Killings

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SIGN God's little angels CUIT CAN’T HAVE ESCAPED your notice, especially given American election coverage, that the media possess an deeply inbuilt tendency to finger-point and to blame.

An early professional role-model of mine decreed to those of us under his influence that: “All serious journalism boils down to two simple variants – WE NAME THE GUILTY MAN … and … ARROW POINTS TO DEFECTIVE PART”.

It’s good, therefore – if only for me as a reporter long-stewed in that judgmental marinade – to be highlighting a story characterized by completely the opposite philosophical approach. A story of  extraordinary forgiveness. Continue reading “A Media Rarity: Forgiveness Amid Horror at Killings” »

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