Breaking Bad Bias
Friends!
I want to thank many of you for reaching out after last week's post on radical acceptance. Your willingness to share your most challenging moments and what you have learned about acceptance was inspiring and very much appreciated. The idea of acceptance is certainly easier to embrace as a concept than it is to practice in daily life.
In order to walk this road less traveled of sharing our vulnerability and accepting life as it is, we need help. Lots of help. Being open with our struggles is one step. Having close friends that keep you honest is another. I believe it is also important to consider our environment, as well. If we are to accept and make peace with the triumphs and tribulations of our lives, we also need to consider the sources of our truths, our joys, and our anxieties. So, this week, I want to dive a bit deeper into our media landscape. Not the problems with social media and our tech platforms, even though I have talked about those problems before (particularly here.) No, this time, I want to dissect the purpose of media itself.
Media is plural for medium. And medium, in this context, actually means our environment or surrounding context. The Latin root, MEDIUM, of course, means "in the middle." We are collectively sandwiched "in the middle" of the conversation around us.
Independent media has played an incredibly important role in our liberal democracies. We often refer to the importance of the press as "the fourth state." There is no question in my mind that a free and open society cannot function or reach its fullest potential without free speech and well-functioning media.
But, like anything, too much of a good thing can turn bad. What has gone "wrong," in my humble opinion, is that the media is only focused on revealing problems and in doing so obscures the more nuanced reality of the world around us. The main intent of most newsrooms is to uncover mistakes, reveal corruption, find faults, and challenge all forms of institutional leadership. And, of course, that is inherently good and important.
However, I have often asked myself: Whose job is it to look for what is right? If we only look for what is wrong, how likely are we to find what is right?
I believe that our biggest issue is balance. The scales are tipped in favor of negativity. We are surrounded by a media machine that only unearths bad news. Almost entirely. And ultimately, this is affecting our collective psyche. We are addicted to problems and friction and drama as if that is the only thing that is worthy of reporting. It's almost like it is "beneath" the honor and code of our current press to report something good. Somehow, optimism has become low-brow.
This has tremendous psychological effects on our souls as a whole. The more negativity we surround ourselves with, the less we trust anything. The paranoia feels palpable. We have more scientific knowledge, more access to truth, and greater education than ever before -- and yet, we are submerged in a sea of distrust. Media is setting the tone, expectations, and cultural gravity of our public discourse, and I would argue that the current obsession with "finding fault" is discouraging hope, suffocating potential, and sowing seeds of doubt and cynicism in the fabric of societal trust.
Sadly, there have been many efforts (I have invested in some of them) where people have shared good stories. Most of those efforts have failed. It sadly points to some fundamental reality within us humans that suggests that we are more drawn to negative news, sensationalism, and embarrassment than we are to inspiring feel-good stories. Good news apparently doesn't sell as well. It reminds me of the old saying:
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
I sometimes dream that we could have a silent day. Or, week, even. Where all reporting would be quiet. No news. New bulletins. Just sheer silence in the ether. Perhaps some music. Even classical. What would happen? Would we miss a beat? We could replace Twitter with real bird tweets, CNN, and FOX’s constant complaints with the sound of wind, rivers, oceans, and laughter.
Or, even better. Allow me to dream further. What if we all committed to a week where every story was a good one? Where all newsrooms HAD to look for something inspiring. Something good. Something that politicians, business leaders, doctors, and teachers did that was astounding. We would discover that these good things happen every single day. And if we started looking for people doing something good, perhaps more people would start paying attention, and we would thereby reward acts of kindness. Because the real negative consequence of all the criticism is that we expect less and less of each other. The media could help raise the bar rather than lower it.
We must inspect what we expect
So, this is my concern. We are what we look for. If you want to find bad, you will find it. If you want to find good, you will find that, too. Wouldn't we all be better off if we had a more balanced outlook on the world? In order to solve the problems of the world, we cannot sink into the eternal quicksand of pessimism. By celebrating success, and making it a habit, it is easier to right the wrongs and locate our strength in the face of adversity. But as things stand, I find that many of us are paralyzed within the one-note echo chamber of negativity. I don’t advocate for us to remain ignorant to the many urgent matters at hand, but I do believe in balance, and it’s clear to me that our current system isn’t working - neither helping us nor helping us to help others.
I have shared this quote before in a post that followed this same theme of "we are what we believe." I loved that book by Barry Neal Kaufman so much. It really made a difference to my young soul. I think about it often, and I try to remember that Happiness mostly is a choice.
“We could decide, flat out, to stop watching and listening to the news….and to stop reading it, too. We have made an addiction out of being ”informed”, as if knowledge of disasters could somehow contribute to our sense of well-being and serenity. Our lives will never be enriched by the gloomy pronouncements of unhappy people, fearing and judging all that they see. They follow fire engines racing toward billowing black clouds of smoke and ignore the smiling youngsters helping an elderly woman carry her grocery bags. One dramatic traffic accident on a major highway sends reporters scurrying while the stories of four hundred thousand other vehicles that made it home safely go unnoticed. Newscasters replay over and over again a fatal plane crash captured on videotape but rarely depict the tenderness of a mother nurturing her newborn infant.
Simple acts of love, safe arrivals, peaceful exchanges between neighboring countries and people helping each other are noteworthy events. The media bias towards sensationalism and violence presents a selective, distorted and, in the final analysis, inaccurate portrait of the state of affairs on this planet. No balance here. We feed our minds such bleak imagery, then feel lost, depressed and impotent without ever acknowledging fully the devastating impact these presentations have on our world view and our state of mind.”
— BARRY NEAL KAUFMAN IN "HAPPINESS IS A CHOICE"
Here are some things I highly recommend for your week ahead.
A big THANK YOU to my friend Monty Moran who has written a beautiful book on leadership called Love is Free. Guac is Extra. Monty was the Co-CEO of Chipotle for many years, and I had the distinct honor and privilege to serve as director and Chairman of Chipotle for many years during his formidable leadership. Monty has recently produced a mini-docu series for PBS with the title: CONNECTED - A SEARCH FOR UNITY. The idea is core to the theme of this newsletter. He set out to look for what unites us, not what divides us. The footage is sensational, the conversations are human, and there is a lot of love in the air. Simply beautiful.
From my friend Arne Gjers, I got this post on National Friendship week with a lot of brilliant lessons from life. I liked every single one. Thank you, Arne, for bringing this to my attention.
From Adam Grant in HBR, I read a good article on "Persuading the Unpersuadable," which I found to be worth reading.
Lastly, I found Darren Walker's interview on 60 minutes to be remarkable. Few voices in America today can articulate the social dissonance we are experiencing with more humanity, precision, and compassion than Darren. His leadership at the Ford Foundation is setting an incredible example for many to follow. I posted an article by Darren in an earlier blog here.
That's it for this week. I will double down on my own media habits. I will turn off most of the noise and go hunting for all the great acts of kindness, goodness, and love that exist everywhere. And in this way, I am lucky and fortunate because so many of you constantly remind me of the good that is out there. So thank you!
Have a great week!
