By: Edvin Jurin, McCann Zagreb
I love the media.
The media– print, radio, television and recently digital – and the journalists who report and comment in them have marked my professional and personal life. Many of the key holders of Croatian media space were and still are my good friends. With them I have rejoiced, and sometimes even mourned, both professionally and personally.
But lately my proverbial passion for media of all kinds is dwindling. Under the aegis of “Good news – no news” in the print and digital media (which are still, sadly, a copy-paste of their older printed brother), which are blindly, and almost always without serious fact checking, followed by the electronic media, such as television, like lightning before your eyes flash headlines that reveal anger and frustration. Often less than reasonably in touch with reality.
Screaming headlines
Where politicians are concerned, it’s mostly of the form: “X threatens Y”, “A humiliates B”. When the fairer gender is in question, the headlines that dominate are of the kind: “With her short skirt and cleavage she enthralled passersby…” “Everyone turns around for this pair of legs…” A significant contribution to this comes from the newly created stars and starlets, the real ones as well as those on the rise, who post their selfies in bed, in the bathroom, on the balcony – their sexist orientation coming from the authors themselves. Where, I wonder, are the women’s organizations now – the defenders of women’s rights – to defend their same-sex members from themselves.
In this nightmare of bad taste in anything and everything, even Mamić’s legendary statement – “You shall not pass bandit …!!!” – appears to be harmless and benign.
A society of consumers
Why is this so?
Because – as theorists of modern trends claim – we are tacitly allowing it and thus approve the idea that we are becoming a society made up of 90% consumers and 10% those who devise bait for the consumers (read entertainment tools).
This is essentially a flat screen society, which I fear, and increasingly dread, with each passing day. Because everything lives for a day… No, scratch that, that’s me being too ambitious, it’s often only a single hour. There’s no empathy, no digging under the skin and into the depths of the soul of the being in front of us. There’s no thorough analysis, meaningful review or ambitious comment to clarify today, compared to yesterday, with possible consequences for tomorrow.
It is therefore a society of the misguided (read: numbed) and those who professionally misguide (read: numb down).
What will happen if through such a process of the disintegration of everything, the media and the public, we get to a situation where every human being on the face of the earth becomes a content provider and thus, by default, a self-made medium. Nothing, or everything? We will wish that all 7-8 billion of us (read newly-composed media) be again reviewed by the distant Big Brother, from whom we will ask for an assessment of the rational, in the flood of the irrational. With the acceptance of all the consequences that such a path brings. In our technological progress, we return to our primordial beginnings.
Let’s create a positive social atmosphere
I don’t know everything, but I certainly know that such communications don’t contribute to the development of a positive atmosphere in society. They are the petrol on the social fuse, not a balm that relieves pain, refreshes us, proactively encourages us or gives us strength to go on.
That’s why I’m not a priori for a society of positive communications, but rather of reasonable communications. And for that we need constructive media pioneers and lighthouses as far as the media and media creators are concerned.
Initially, these cannot just be those young people who run from one location to another and report live with decisive voices from places where there’s no one else but themselves. We need knowledge, experience and analytical skills, complemented with youthful energy, which should be mentored, guided and upgraded, and then selectively and responsibly allowed into the media focus.
Hints of the desired were given five or six years ago by the (prematurely) retired king of the radio airwaves, Jura Hrvačić with his pioneering radio show “Good News”.
It can be done. So let’s work on it, because this is the only – and the real – challenge of today’s society, from now on!
