journalists – The Red Pen of Doom

Listen: I get how watching the news right now is like a train wreck, except each new day brings a bigger, more fiery train wreck than the day before. And you just want it to stop, and go back to normal, but can’t turn away.

As a reformed journalist, I’m a complete and utter news addict. Went to rehab–didn’t help one bit.

So I feel you.

Here’s what is really going on.

Chaos and confusion

In normal times, a scandal is big news for weeks or months. One large scandal can easily end a political career, or bring a CEO down.

What’s happening now is a flood of scandals and outrages, and yes, part of that is because the world’s most powerful man is a moody, incompetent toddler. But it’s also by design.

Vladimir Putin has a large country with a tiny economy. He can’t beat the West in economics, or even in a straight military conflict. What he’s doing is sowing discord, distrust and chaos through lies, misinformation and propaganda.

Brexit and Donald Trump are only two examples. Look hard enough–or listen to the intelligence community pros and reporters who cover national security–and you’ll see evidence of this information war being waged all over the free world.

Putin + Trump = a perfect marriage

Putin’s strategy is perfectly aligned with what Donald Trump has done his entire life: use conflict and chaos to build his name ID and get press coverage. The twist is, Trump didn’t care whether the coverage was good or bad, as long as they spelled his name right. Affairs, divorces, scandals–didn’t matter. Just get him on the front page or the Howard Stern show.

Working in reality TV only cemented this strategy. If everything goes right on a reality show, the ratings stink. What sells? Conflict and chaos, betrayals and big fights.

And when there’s a new political scandal or outrage every day, it’s hard to remember the seven train wrecks from last week, or last month.

Attacking the media

The other half of this is attacking the foundations of truth–the free press–while trafficking in lies, misinformation and propaganda.

They want average people to be numb and apathetic, and to mistrust what’s coming from real journalists.

To create doubt and fear.

What you can do

It’s easy to get hooked on the news in times like this. It feels like the middle of a presidential primary, the days before a Super Bowl, the first moments of a war.

When you care about something, getting glued to the screen is easy.

I’m not saying you ignore the news, quitting it cold turkey.

The trick is balancing out gathering information, and being informed, with taking action.

Because gathering info in a time like this can never end. There’s always a new scandal, another angle you hadn’t considered, a rabbit hole to go down.

The more you care, the more you tend to read and watch, and it certainly feels like you’re doing something.

Except it’s not actually taking action, and it’ll take average people refusing to be apathetic to bring things back to normal.

Elections alone won’t win this kind of fight, especially if you live in a country where elections are partially or fully rigged.

Check out this chapter for more on Winning the War on Truth.

Kurt Vonnegut was the Man.

Go back and read his books. DO IT NOW.

Once you’ve read his books, and fully appreciate his literary genius, you can watch this low-definition video with horrible audio that still rocks because it has KURT FREAKING VONNEGUT.

I would have paid monies to have him as my professor. Now that I think about it, I did pay monies to have professors. Hmm. Though my journalism profs were top-notch. Props to you all.

Now, it’s not so complicated, is it?

Hero in a hole.

Boy meets girl.

Girl with a problem.

Albert Einstein — and thousands of other people far, far smarter than you or I put together, even on our good days when our fingers spark magic and the coffee we drink would do better on an IQ test than Michele Bachmann — spent many years trying to come up with a unified theory of everything.

See, the whole E=MC2 was only part of the answer. That’s the equation for energy. He wanted to do an equation that also explained gravity and whatnot. IT IS COMPLICATED. We will not get into it.

But writing isn’t rocket science. Not even close.

Oh, people get all mystical and complicated, and come up with their own jargon and rules. Yet these self-appointed writing gurus all disagree, and they specialize so much that they know more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing.

You’ve got screenwriters and reporters, poets and novelists, playwrights (who spell their name wrong) and songwriters (spelling it right, good job), copywriters and non-fiction authors — all with their own rules and jargon, their own writing conferences and groups that hand out awards.

You’ve got endless shelves of books about the craft of writing, each expert giving their own special equations to maybe solve a piece of of the puzzle.

Hear me now and believe me later in the week: We could unify this sucker, and we could do it without a lick of calculus or a single imaginary number. (Having -1 bottles of rieslings does nothing for me.)

So let’s do it. I have evil ideas, and have scribbled on the blackboard while cackling with glee.

But I’d like to hear what my brilliant writer friends say. How would you smash the walls that separate the different houses of writers?