Alternative Editorial: Where is truth?

From Singularity Hub

In week 88 of The Shift - an extended moment of disorientation and re-orientation caused by the Covid pandemic - we find ourselves with ever deeper questions. The UK is undergoing a long period of disillusion with power, peaking with the UK Prime Minister illustrating the double standards of Downing Street—and a parliament unable to challenge him. 

Johnson - as described in a recent editorial - is himself a journalist and PR professional, teaching us the magical powers of storytelling. How to create a new reality for your audience and stick to it. Only this week it is not about whether a party is a work meeting, it's about whether or not we are in border conflicts between nation states, or at the start of World War 3. 

This is not a new battle of narratives. While very few of us reading might have witnessed the outbreak of WW2, more of us will have lived through the battles for the Falkland Islands, Kosovo and more again through the invasion of Iraq. For those who study conflict transformation, each of those was a teachable moment on the role of the media in shaping outcomes. 

Through that period, as members of Transcend Network, we were helping to develop Johan Galtung's 'Peace Journalism', which exists today as an academic training in five universities (in particular courses led by Jake Lynch and Annabelle McGoldrick at the Department of Peace & Conflict Studies, Sidney University). Without attempting to sum up the learnings here, at the core was the revelation that no media outlet is neutral in its output. Every one has an agenda that its content delivers on. 

Peace Journalism only became necessary because of the unexamined 'war agenda' of the mainstream, overly dependent on the military industrial complex, itself tied to our growth economy. Its critique is still powerfully relevant.

Think of the 'soft power' agenda of both the UK and the USA to stay in the public imagination as the defenders of democracy, in a world full of dangerous demagogues (specifically China and Russia). Think also - in the UK at least - of the importance of keeping the public imagination trained on world changing events while the PM is being investigated by the police. 

With these incentives becoming increasingly clear to the public, it's hard to respond to the call to take all our fear and resentment about the misuse of power, and unambiguously train it on Vladimir Putin. Is it right to 'take up arms' and be ready to send our children to war on this pretext?

Imagine if, instead - as Jake and Annabelle describe - "editors and reporters make choices - of what to report, and how to report it - that create opportunities for society at large to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict.” Why are we not reading about the will of the Ukrainian people to 'talk down' war? 

Any comms system must see its own agenda

It's a quandary often shared by most European countries and the United States of America: in this age of mass communication, what counts as truth? With huge swathes of the public caught up in the steep learning curve of understanding aspects of power previously opaque to them - whether colonisation, social injustice, gender inequality - the powers that be are in survival mode. They outlaw this 'waking up' by taking on the young, the curious and the experimenting, even labelling their stepping into response-ability as 'culture wars'. 

The mainstream media reflects this fearful stance by calling any challenge to the mainstream thought populist, polarised and even fascist. Where is the media that can see the social, developmental value in 'waking up’? By naming this latter value as our agenda, do we thereby reveal the 'conservative' agenda of keeping society static, in thrall to the old power system of the 20th Century? In both cases, power in the public space seems to be imploding. As an entire human species facing a difficult future, where is our agency?

Away from the mainstream headlines, many organisations are developing communications systems to bring together those actors who have already accepted responsibility for responding to the multiple crises, despite the news headlines.

This would include those in pursuit of a new economy (e.g. The Well Being Alliance), new education systems (e.g. YouthXYouth), new kinds of cities (e.g. Integral Cities), new practices as transformation catalysts (e.g. Bounce Beyond), next level community development (e.g. CtrlShift) and all the learning around the socio-politics of biodiversity (e.g. Humanity Rising).

They share a clear agenda that responds actively to the environmental crisis as truth - a clear commitment in the face of a news media that feels obliged to give equal airtime to the 8% who are climate deniers. This identifies shared values, agreed principles and opens up spaces for collaboration between them. The Alternative UK is certainly aligned with these goals.

At the same time, when thinking about the communications system that can succeed in delivering on this agenda, it has to be able to negotiate a public space that is not aligned. That very public space which, as described above, has been divided, triggered and set on a steep learning curve by the old system.

If our comms systems cannot 'see' their own context for success, they are doomed to stay trapped within their own bubble and remain irrelevant. 

This challenge is not the same as proposing an agenda as the one that includes every other agenda, making each relatively important. That has the effect of neutralising all agendas and giving power back to the status quo. 

This challenge is also not the same as adopting the same emotional stance as the majority. To be able to acknowledge the trauma in our socio-political-economic system, to stand with the pain of others, is not the same as being defined by it.

New tools to get out of the news trap

For example, the run up to the European Referendum in the UK (Brexit) revealed - through committed research - a deep desire amongst British citizens for more control over their lives. 

While it is undeniable that this desire was weaponised by the Leave campaign, gaining a result that did not offer any net-increase of actual control to the voters, the emotional need it tapped was - and remains - legitimate: a call to all those who think about socio-political design for well being. Some might say that the campaigns for 4 day weeks (see this week's blog) or Universal Basic Income are responding to that ambition.

Yet this is not easily achieved. Until Galtung named Peace Journalism, the majority had not realised that the norm had been War Journalism. Our wider culture thinks of peace as a fluffy, or hippy notion never thinking through what arises in its absence. The “Reporting the World”conferences that drew mainstream journalists from both the 'broadsheets' and 'red-tops' (old terms that referred to the divide between serious and populist papers), everyone claimed - and believed - they were "just reporting the facts".

Peace Journalism sounded biased and lacking real facts by comparison. Positive News - an excellent solutions driven publication - suffers the same fate. They appear narrowly focused to those that insist they have no agenda, as they report from the unchallenged norms of the old system. They cannot see the negative bias of their headlines.

At best this 'neutral' way of reporting gives rise to paradox: on the one hand  we acknowledge the value of all that is Peaceful or Positive, but cannot land them within a bigger idea that they are unrealistic and partial. Until we name the current dominant narrative - Violent and Negative - and work to transcend the oppositions that gives rise to, we will not be able to land a more effective news reporting that is capable of taking our collective will forward. 

So what would a transformational communications system look like? It has to design not only for increased flow of information between those who are giving rise to a regenerative socio-economic-political system. It also has to develop language and narrative that can appeal in a new way to those who are currently trapped by the old system—fully aware of the potential for risk and failure.

We may not be able to do that through agreed values, as these values are currently misrepresented by the old media landscape. For example, the demand for compassion and freedom rarely co-exists in the same news report, while both are emotional needs essential to human flourishing. 

We may have to reach for new tools to get ourselves out of that trap. As The Alternative UK moves towards its 5th birthday next week, we are committed to developing those tools through the use of art, design, play and imagination in our communications - all in service to the transformation we know is possible. 

Get ready: we're on the move and hope to take you with us.