DailyJim: Rehumanizing journalists

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym this episode for tuesday july 9th 2024 today i want to talk about rehumanizing journalists in news organizations etc so i was interacting with someone on twitter and this has happened over and over again i think there are a lot of people on twitter um especially and i call it twitter not x i think the name is so dumb to be honest um. Yeah, I don't think a private individual should come in and buy a platform that's supposed to be a public square and then rename it to his own liking. It'd be like somebody coming into a country and saying, oh, this is a democratic country, now I'm a king, and it'll be called the land of Musk, Muskland. Land like no sorry sorry i don't i don't believe that's how our platform should be run um that was a side note but going into the human rehumanizing journalists i hear a lot of people on twitter and i'm sure this happens on a lot of these platforms just a lot of online media platforms that are not owned by the quote-unquote mainstream media which i think is just frankly a catch-all bullshit term that people lump any organization into that they think is one, sufficiently big, and two. Sufficiently biased against them, either against them or doesn't care about them. And I think it just leads to more and more distrust in the world. And I'm just so tired of people trying to convince me that the world doesn't care about me, that journalists don't care about me, that they're They're trying to trick me and manipulate me and that their whole existence is to lie or that they are puppets of a larger scheme. Just so much dehumanizing language towards these individual humans who are frankly, many of them are dedicating their lives to a very dangerous field because they believe in the.

Um, I was here in Nairobi a couple of years ago. I think it was a couple of years ago. I went to an event that was talking about journalists who had come home from war. So these were photojournalists and they were sound, uh, I think called like sound editors or sound journalists, uh, who had gone into war primarily in Africa. I think that was in the civil war in South Sudan. I think they were post-election violence in Kenya in 2007. I think they were also in the genocide in Rwanda and talking about the emotional trauma that they brought home from going into war, how to be in the war in, for example, the genocide in Rwanda and then take a flight back home. So go from seeing people being killed, hearing people being killed with machetes, and then take a flight back home and be with your wife and kids. How to process that, how to deal with that, how to be on the scene. And ethically, they're not supposed to intervene because they're supposed to be a silent observer, a third party observer. Observer, but how to refrain from intervening when somebody is maybe caught in an earthquake and you have an extra pair of hands who could, you know, maybe help dig people out of the rubble. I mean, these deep emotional kind of existential questions in some way, or to voluntarily go into a war zone to report what's going on, or to voluntarily go undercover to try to understand and what's going on in a drug organization or a human trafficking organization.

So many people in this field feel so much, put so much on the line because of a desire and a curiosity to understand the truth and to reveal what's actually going on in the world so that we can have a better understanding of it so that we can collaborate and work together better. And it angers me that so many people seem to believe that these people do not have good intentions.

And I could probably say this for any group of people, but like it just, it's bothering me more and more because as I spend more time on these platforms, they, it just seems to be the message I hear over and over again, and it's like, I mean, I could jump in and say, oh, you know, their intention of saying this message is, well, one of the best ways to take out the competition, the old incumbent guard, is to say, hey, you know, the people who you've been listening to, they've been lying to you. But me, I'm telling the truth. You know, them, they've been lying. But me, I'm telling the truth. Well, not necessarily.

But even these people who are doing that, I still don't think their intentions are bad. I think they're just craving for attention. I think they're, they may legitimately believe that nobody cares about them and everyone's lying to them and everyone's a puppet. And so therefore it's their duty and their right to speak up and try to protect people. I just, I think it's a wildly inaccurate belief to believe that human beings don't care about each other and that they don't care about us. I just don't think it's, I don't think it's very accurate. it. I think from my experience, so many people care about me, often care about me more than they want to. I think that's a much more accurate description of how human beings interact with each other. And even if it's not, I feel so much better when I believe this, and it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meaning that if I believe this, other people may start to behave in a way that aligns with that. Whereas the opposite I would think is also true. If I believe people don't care about me, if I believe the media doesn't care about me, media, whichever the hell, whatever the hell that means. I'm so tired of these generic statements. If I believe that CNN or MSNBC or specific contributors on these platforms don't care about me. Maybe at some point it hurts them enough when enough people say, hey, listen, you don't care about me, that they get jaded, they get numb, and they stop caring. Or at least they stop wanting to care, because they think they still will always care.

And how does it, therefore, do they start lying more? Because they're like, well, nobody's going to trust me anyways. I mean, it's the person being in a relationship, and their partner thinks that they're cheating on them the whole time, despite them not cheating at all, not even coming close. And at some point it's like well if you're just gonna assume i'm gonna cheat maybe i should because i can't do anything to prove to you that i'm not going to so screw it i'm so tired of being accused of not caring about you um yeah so i just i hope we break through this i hope we realize just how it's like a it's like almost a self-fulfilling misery that we put ourselves selves through by believing that people don't care about us or that people are out to get us. I think it's, you know, two sides of the same coin. And I hope, I hope people just step back a little bit and realize that these are human beings who work in most of these news, who work in mostly every human being that works in a news organization is a human being. And this is a a person that has a tremendous amount of context and aspirations and fears and joys and dreams and all these different things and so can we please just start to realize that they're human beings and they're trying their best so on that note i'm gonna go sleep and uh yeah i hope this helped a little bit in at least shaking up your perspective as it relates to news and journalists.