We love information.
In order to communicate information,
we need mediums.
In today's world this means
we're dependent on things like:
newspapers, magazines, radio,
television and the Internet.
The Media
For those of you that don't know,
media is simply the plural form
of the word medium.
Now the thing is that these mediums
have incredible power to influence
both positively and negatively.
The reality is that
if you are in the world today,
you have a relationship with mass media.
So it would be cool of you to understand it.
The first thing to understand about the media
is that regardless of what any member of the media
or whatever media platform says,
the media is actually not for you,
and it also isn't against you.
It's not here to directly benefit you
and it's not here to destroy you either.
The media,
end of story,
is a business.
Now when it comes to business,
everybody has a reason,
a very personal one for why
they're in that particular business.
And everyone has their own personal best interests
to consider.
The media is focused
on what sells.
And the only way to do this
is to focus on what gets attention, ratings and subscriptions.
Another way of saying this,
is the media is focused on delivering information
or entertainment that matters to people.
The primary reason that you shouldn't
immediately swallow and immediately believe
anything that you hear or read or see on the media,
is specifically because of that,
it's a business.
When it comes to business,
the first thing that you need to understand
is there are always personal best interests,
personal interests,
to consider.
The question is:
"What are those interests, and who's?"
There are several elements that determine
what is considered important to someone,
what matters.
Things or elements
that capture people's attention.
Elements like conflict,
threat,
crisis,
intrigue,
the bizarre,
intense,
death,
celebrity,
impact,
timeliness,
proximity and human interest,
which is basically stories about people
that evoque heightened emotionality.
All of us know by this point,
that the media is not exempt from corruption.
I mean no business really is.
With any business,
it's really up to the individuals within that business
and the platform's themselves,
how closely they're gonna operate
according to ethics and standards,
or how much they're going to abandon them.
I'm going to tell you a little personal story;
The first time in my career
that a major news outlet
ran a slander story about me,
and my lawyer,
my entertainment lawyer contacted them,
it was very calmly explained to me
by both this entertainment lawyer
and the media platform itself,
that this is actually a good thing.
Why?
Because once you get to a certain level of fame,
let's say that there's a little |under the carpet contract
that occurs,
though not in writing,
it's understood in the business
that once you get big enough
to be of interest to people,
what they will do is they'll write
a negative article about you.
At which point you are then welcome
to spent a large amount of money
to pay them to do a positive one.
After which they will do a negative one,
after which you will pay them again,
to do a positive one.
In their mind,
this actually benefits you and them.
Why?
Because they get to capture the attention
of the people who are interested in you,
and you get to stay relevant.
Now when I asked them:
"Why don't you just do a positive article?
The answer is pretty obvious.
Because that's not going to get the kind of attention
that a negative one will.
~ Laughter ~
In other words,
nobody actually cares how good of a person Teal Swan is.
This should terrify you,
because if money can dictate
what is or is not
put up on these mediums.
Then it is corporations
that in fact rule news.
It's corporations that rule media.
Whoever has the money,
is the one that's going to dictate what information
is put out or not.
In other words,
if money dictates what stories are done and published
or even which ones are suppressed,
the information being shared,
can be dictated by the corporations that would benefit
by that information being shared or not shared.
This is what is happening right now
with pharmaceutical companies, for example.
Health care is a business, right?
And you can see all these different sectors in health care.
You can see hospitals, you can see individual clinics,
you can see alternative medicinal clinics.
These are all to be looked at as different sectors
of the overall healthcare business.
Now media is this over all business
with several sectors, as well.
Every platform of media is going to be different
and they are not all created equal.
For example,
we know that some news channels
offer only completely biased reporting.
Whereas others are more reliable
in terms of offering a balanced story.
Something that needs to be understood
but of course is going to create a lot of resistance
in the news media sector,
is the fact that it's not actually possible
for an individual to do a story
that isn't biased.
It can be a goal,
but not actually psychologically possible.
~ Laughter ~
We should all be completely in support
of things like the ethics code of journalism.
However, they often run counter to human psychology itself.
And any philosopher could successfully win a debate
where the argument is that it is possible
to be truly balanced and fair
when an individual is the one representing information.
This must especially be understood relative to news media
because news is a business for journalists and reporters as well.
Something that interests me particularly,
is that when people watch the news,
they seem to think that those news channels
reporting those things
or those journalists covering those stories
is some sort of a good Samaritan act.
Like sharing the truth is something that we do for the good of mankind.
What I need you to do
is to get this idea out of your head.
Though, there may be journalists
who also have some motivation
mixed in there to tell the personal truth
and think that's super important,
I'll explain that later,
It's not a good Samaritan Act.
These stories are covered and these things are done
specifically to drum up good business
because media is a business.
A reporter is not a self-sacrificing philanthropist.
He or she has a career.
When he or she decides to cover a story,
it is done for the sake of the advancement
of his or her own career.
The way they report on a story,
the content they decide to report in
and the way they conduct an interview
is based on their own success.
When a celebrity or a politician
sits down to do an interview,
they are also focused on one thing,
and that's to get their message across.
Now to people who are sitting there
and watching in one of these interviews,
it's pretty tempting to think
that they're having a conversation where the job is
to ask questions and answer questions.
That actually isn't the case with media.
It's not their job to do that at all.
In fact, it's not their focus,
even though it seems like they're having a conversation,
they're playing two different games.
It's a game of mutual use.
And to be quite honest with you,
that game is usually a zero-sum game.
It goes a little something like this:
A reporter is trained
to put people in the exact position
that they want them in,
for the sake of their own career advancement.
If somebody they're interviewing gets overly emotional
or false into one of the many traps
that they are trained to set,
then what's happened is that the reporter,
gains in terms of their career advancement.
If the person being interviewed
doesn't fall into any of those intentionally placed traps
and instead manages to convey
whatever message they want to convey
for the sake of their own advancement, they win.
Hopefully what I've just said,
will make it make sense to you why our president
answers questions or evades them the way that he does.
When people first become aware
of the reality of the media,
usually it's a little bit of a disillusionment process
and it's tempting to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But this is not what I'm arguing for at all.
Any more than I'd be arguing to throw a business
out of the window entirely.
So the thing to understand is that
media is actually important
and we all want it.
And reporters and journalists
and these people who work in the media,
are people too.
There's always subconscious and conscious reasons
why we gravitate towards the specific careers that we do.
Because this episode is on media,
I'm going to take you for a little deep dive
into the subconscious and conscious
reasons that would cause somebody to become
a reporter or a journalist.
Now, this is in the sector of news media.
Most journalists and reporters
were deeply wounded in their childhood
relative to their incapacity
to actually gain importance.
In other words,
they were surrounded by people
who didn't actually see them as as special
or as important enough to deserve their full-blown attention.
So they had to get importance
in other people's lives,
in roundabout ways.
The closest they could get to feeling important
was by being a part of something that those people in their lives
found to be important.
They had to be a part of it all and in the middle of it,
or else they were completely alone.
The story that a journalist a reporter
will want to tell or choose to tell,
is the story that will make they themselves
feel or seem the most important.
Ironically because of this,
they're prone to shadow important strategies.
For example, there's a natural envy that exists in them,
towards people who are seen as important.
This creates a subconscious desire
to tear down the people who are important enough
for them to report on, in the first place.
They also feel important in the power they hold
which is being in the know
and being in control of the perspective of the viewer,
i.e. public opinion.
All this being said,
reporters and journalists,
people who work in news media,
tend to have extreme moral streaks.
In other words,
they're conscious enough
of having been deeply hurt by someone
and conscious enough of their deep need to be included in the social group,
to not want to be important
for being the bad guy.
Instead, they want to be important for being the good guy.
The best way to do that, is to go for the role of the hero.
The shadow and this of course,
is that if you choose to see yourself as the hero,
you can come up with all kinds of excuses and justifications
for the behavior that you're having
and you can condone almost anything.
This is what journalists are doing
when they play buddy-buddy with people,
so as to get the inside Intel,
even though in the normal day-to-day life,
we would consider that massive betrayal,
they can consider themselves heroes
because doing so enabled a nightmare person
to really reveal their true colors.
The "sister" wound
that drives people to become journalists or reporters,
also is along this line of morality.
It's an absolute obsession
with truth.
This wound that drives people to become journalists or reporters,
is being hurt by untruths.
They have this in common with many scientists as well,
ironically.
This is the wound that makes this profession
more enticing than other professions
where one could get importance in a roundabout way.
I have never in my lifetime
sat crossed the table with any journalist or reporter
who didn't have this wound
of being deeply hurt by untruths.
For example,
damage or consequence that came
from false information,
lying,
gaslighting,
naivety...
Anything that's along those lines of untruths,
is their deep deep wound.
Besides the importance or unimportance factor.
Because of this,
truth and what's real becomes
their definition of safety.
It becomes an absolute obsession.
And they see themselves as public heroes
for being the ones to establish that truth.
To offer that truth,
to show you that truth.
Now the subconscious motivation in doing this
is that if they can do that for you
they're gonna spare humanity and everyone
the pain that they themselves suffered.
The thing is,
especially the longer that somebody works
in media itself,
a journalists or reporter
is destined to run into
an existential crisis relative to truth.
The deeper that they get into exposing truth,
the more they're gonna find that truth is incredibly complicated.
It is much more than meets the eye,
it is multi-faceted,
it involves multiple perspectives,
it gets more and more slippery the deeper you get into it,
it's difficult to establish
and people can influence it with a simple difference of inflection.
~ Laughter ~
So when a reporter or journalist
naturally gets into this existential crisis,
what determines how ethical or unethical
they're going to ultimately be
as a journalist or reporter,
depends on how they handle this existential crisis relative to truth.
The people who are not going to handle it well,
are going to be so upset
by the fact that truth is difficult to get at,
that they're simply going to
mistake their own subjective perspective as the ultimate truth.
Now if a really good journalist
meets this existential crisis
and allows an evolution to happen,
their own perspective is going to get wider,
wider, wider, wider, wider, wider
and they will get better actually,
at unbiased or balanced reporting,
as possible as it can be at least.
Obviously there are many wounds
and motives and beliefs that would negatively tarnish
one's ability to accurately seek and tell the truth.
Obviously when a person's own importance and career advancement
juxtaposes the truth,
it presents a bit of a conflict of interests
for somebody who possesses both interests.
But truth seekers and truth tellers are needed.
Information is needed
and entertainment holds immense potential.
Media is a business
just like any other business.
And you actually have a hell of a lot more control over it
than you think.
And this is going to be my core message for you today.
Because most people feel out of control
of what's in the media.
You're not out of control of it.
In fact, you're dictating it.
Because the media is a business
that operates specifically according
to what gets attention,
ratings and subscriptions,
it kind of depends on what you are deeming important
and what you give your attention to.
Doesn't it?
It is in fact people
that are in control of what's on media.
The downside of all this is this:
Much of what drives your attention
is biological.
That being said,
you can actually
expand wider than your own biology,
become aware that your biology is dictating
a lot of what you give your attention to,
and you can instead be in a place
of conscious choice,
in terms of where to put your attention.
The media is primarily a reflection of what interests humans.
If people change what they're interested in,
the content on the media will change.
Every time you watch a show,
every time you click on a new story,
every time you tune into a podcast you are voting
for what information is important to you.
And each vote you cast,
adds up to the picture of what is important to the human race.
So from this day forward,
when it comes to giving your attention to anything,
think about your vote.
If something is important enough
to capture your attention, ask yourself:
"Why?"
"Why is this important to me?"
Every time you watch something,
every time you click on something,
that's an invitation for the media to show you more of that.
For this reason,
everything you deemed to be important enough
to deserve your attention,
is shaping the future.
Have a good week
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com