A poem from which many of my gen­er­a­tion drew per­ceived wis­dom includes the line: “And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the uni­verse is unfold­ing as it should.”.To my deep cha­grin, I find it is not clear, and I sin­cere­ly hope there’s a course cor­rec­tion in the unfold­ing bit, start­ing with the way we’re being kept up to date with the process.

That’s a self-cush­ion­ing way of say­ing that the media – and how one miss­es the sobri­quet “Press” – and the way it is unfold­ing bears some blame for my lack of clarity.
Leav­ing aside my pedant’s dis­gust that bad gram­mar has reached the point of being accept­able, I’m los­ing the plot on how and at whom news is directed.
For exam­ple; the increas­ing­ly ubiq­ui­tous “toss” from anchor to reporter on TV is a ver­sion of “What do we know about…?”
Who is “we” and if “we” already know, why do “we” need to be told.
Being Cana­di­an, I’m sup­pos­ed­ly genet­i­cal­ly pre­dis­posed towards politeness.
But for the life of me I can­not under­stand why cor­re­spon­dents in the field, or stu­dio, are invari­ably accord­ed some ver­sion, of “Thanks for that news.”
At times it bor­ders on the gush­ing. A BBC sports reporter on a cushy for­eign assign­ment was actu­al­ly blessed with: “Thank you for com­ing on and shar­ing that with us…”
It’s his bloody job. He gets paid to do it. And hav­ing been an on air cor­re­spon­dent for  decades, I can assure you that what we call “mak­ing air” is our rai­son d’etre.
Nor is it clear to me how, unless I’m in my own uni­verse and don’t know it, news­casts can be summed up in ver­sions of “That’s your headlines/sports/news/weather or what­ev­er…”when there’s noth­ing per­son­al about them.
Anoth­er area of con­fu­sion is the appar­ent obses­sion with mak­ing the com­plex job of report­ing poten­tial skull­dug­gery even hard­er by insist­ing on walk­ing a tightrope in the name of the ever-elu­sive and hypo­thet­i­cal “bal­ance and objectivity”.
Lies are lies and do not deserve the ben­e­fit of the doubt.
Gov­erned as we are in the “free world” by oppor­tunists, incom­pe­tents, the unprin­ci­pled  and just plain fools, aid­ed and abet­ted by social media and now the iniq­ui­ties of AI, jour­nal­ists need to take both inspi­ra­tion and solace from the tren­chant obser­va­tion of nov­el­ist Margeu­rite Duras:
“Jour­nal­ism with­out a moral posi­tion is impos­si­ble. Every jour­nal­ist is a moral­ist. It’s absolute­ly unavoid­able.” 

                              OTHER UNIVERSES…                      

It seems unlike­ly the uni­verse can only be “unfold­ing as it should” if there is a fix­a­tion with Joe Biden’s age, per­ceived men­tal laps­es and his every mis­s­peak, while Don­ald Trump’s age and equal­ly, if not more fre­quent and egre­gious ver­bal and cog­ni­tive short­com­ings, are mere­ly seen as “just Trump being Trump”.
If the vot­ers’ only choice is “either/or”, sure­ly equal scruti­ny is mandatory.
That’s all the more nec­es­sary because in spite of every news­cast being spon­sored by var­i­ous forms of med­ica­tion, there’s none on offer, even at Big Phar­ma- inflat­ed prices, to treat the malaise head­lined: “Do Amer­i­cans Have a Col­lec­tive Amne­sia About Don­ald Trump?”.
The diag­no­sis was: “In inter­views, vot­ers often have a hazy recall of one of the most tumul­tuous peri­ods in mod­ern politics.”
If that isn’t bad enough, the Biden administration’s Gaza pol­i­cy is unfold­ing in what seem like sep­a­rate universes.
Build­ing a tem­po­rary “port” to bring in aid is a well-mean­ing and imag­i­na­tive plan.
So how does that rec­on­cile with air-drop­ping food aid – which relief agen­cies say is the most inef­fi­cient and least cost-effec­tive way to deliv­er it – while secret­ly sup­ply­ing Israel with “thou­sands of pre­ci­sion-guid­ed muni­tions, small-diam­e­ter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and oth­er lethal aid” to drop on peo­ple ren­dered so des­per­ate even MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) are like man­na from heaven?

                                 MEANWHILE…

Then there’s the uni­verse inhab­it­ed by a sec­tion of the nation that hails itself as “land of the free and home of the brave”, yet rabid­ly and unques­tion­ing­ly sup­ports a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date who bla­tant­ly boasts he will be “a dic­ta­tor” on Day One .
Accord­ing to Pew Research, Trump gar­nered 84% of the White Evan­gel­i­cal vote in 2020.
How do self-des­ig­nat­ed ardent Chris­t­ians square their beliefs with sup­port for a puta­tive leader who broke three of the Ten Com­mand­ments  (7, 9 and 10), is on tri­al in mul­ti­ple cas­es of fraud (a form of vio­la­tion of num­ber 8) and boast­ed: “I could stand in the mid­dle of Fifth Avenue and shoot some­body and wouldn’t lose any vot­ers, okay?”, a clear vio­la­tion of num­ber 6 (“Thou shat not kill”).
It will help clear up some of my con­fu­sion if they can explain to me  how they explain that to their children.
But maybe in the new  uni­verse of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, such nuance doesn’t need to be part of the unfold­ing scheme.
One can only hope the poet got it wrong.

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