The terrible truth about the media: a fevered view?

Howwwwll!
By Friday, your correspondent was really struggling to breathe, work and keep his sense of absurdity and jest as a first week back in the Factory, after 208 days of absence, drew to a close.
I spent yesterday in bed with a high fever, a gluey yellowish mess in the upper chest and a migraine which began three nights earlier in the Métro -- trying not to be aroused by 'phone calls on the edges of fitful sleep.

Last Sunday night, I consulted the 'I Ching' about going back to work, feeling in need of interaction with the ancient "book of changes" that would be my replacement for the Bible on 'Desert Island Discs'. (The Loyal 4 ¾ may know that translations of the 'I Ching' have been much studied friends of mine for decades, that I have no problem at all reconciling the way it "works" with our modern "scientific" ways of seeing.)
The first hexagramme (I used the more traditional three-coin method) was no surprise at all: 'Fou' or 'Fu' signifies "Return", "renaissance" and a "turning point", and is, as noted by Richard Wilhelm in his masterly edition (linked in English), associated with this month of the winter solstice.
The second, given the single "line of change" the coins indicated, was 'Yi' or 'I', signifying, among other things, "Taking Nourishment", associated with the mouth and with brain or spiritual "food" as well.
So far, so good and so lucid.

The "oddity" came in a first look at the detail.
That changing line from the "main" hexagramme to the second one, in sixth or top place, was inauspicious and quite unexpected. One of its meanings includes the notion that "he (i.e. the consultant) has been given misleading information about his return", coupled with a warning that while "the most fascinating events can capture your attention (...) you will eventually have to return home to normal life".
Though this was singularly ambiguous, I dropped further study in my several 'I Ching' books when the 'phone interrupted my relaxed concentration, and let it rest until today, a week later. It's interesting to note that "Yi", that second hexagramme, is further associated with the digestion and delivery of information(s) (the French word for "news").
Given the way I felt by my third day back at AFP, those notions of "home" and "normal life" are going to take some more processing, consciously or unconsciously.

Maybe today, the wiring and the software will deign to agree to publish the stuff I tried to post halfway through the week. It said:

"I called my first bid to post this entry 'On waking in a rebellious mood'. That implied a swell of anger; now it's just a saddened refusal to resign myself to being sucked into near-madness while I still have the chance.
Ah, Natalie! Ye the alter ego of the obstinate Augustine, you're no longer alone in asking and I can't keep it to myself, that T(errible) T(ruth).
Back in the engine room of the pulsing vessel of one of the world's news machines only three days, I'm already disheartened by all I see with a gaze altered by long absence.

Yesterday, I announced that unless a few things change (which I don't imagine they will), I'm on my way out, looking for a new job.
It's not, of course, my colleagues and friends. What I can no longer tolerate is "the system".
I have almost zero respect left for most people, with exceptions, in the top management of the Factory, for a media factory is precisely what it is.
A factory where journalists are subject to rules and standards of a profession gone insane, often in manic pursuit of non-stories about people engaged in non-events, of not the remotest interest to anybody with an ounce of grey matter still functioning between their ears.
This is called "competition".

Who, to take but one trivial example, seriously gives a monkey's fart about something Colin Powell said in Morocco regarding developments, or the lack of them, in North Korea talks, in response to a non-question by some hack desperate for a "story", a line, a ... "juicy quote"?
Yet this had to be considered worthy, given the standing of the man, of having somebody turn it into a 200-word story. If that's picked up anywhere, by anybody among the Factory's clients, I'll be amazed.
Why was it bothered with? I'd imagine, quite simply, because if we don't have every pearl that falls from General Powell's lips, then other agencies working with twice the resources will inform the world instead.
Like others elsewhere in the agency, I didn't even have time for lunch: it was a matter of collecting a trayful of mediocre nosh from a canteen -- not my favoured Canteen of this 'blog -- and taking it back to the desk.
Some fellow from a trade union said this was "illegal".
So it may be, but the alternative was eating nothing. I'm not returning to all the years of making or buying sandwiches and wrecking my health. As for salads, the doctors have banned me those of yore!
I lost my temper at one point, when three people asked me different "what about?" questions regarding three stories almost simultaneously. I loudly said what wasn't needed on "remembering why I went off sick in the first place: because we all work in a fucking lunatic asylum."

After the initial warmth, I was smouldering. Then came the realisation that in the time since ill health took me out for a while, I may have recovered my sanity, but not my strength and resilience.
I'm not going to lose my mind again for the sake of any news story in the world. If others must get stressed out and as miserable as too many of the faces I'm now seeing afresh, that is their own sad choice.
The standard of copy has declined sharply since first I joined the profession close now to 30 years ago. Stories we're asked to sweat over as sub-editors or worse, to translate from bad writing in other languages, wouldn't have been allowed past the very first pair of editorial eyes when I began at the BBC.
Despite worthy strictures telling we journalists to "return to sender" when such copy pours in, some find it quicker and easier to try to make the famous silk purse out of sow's ear, before it's too late, rather than see clients use somebody else's version. Time for real distance from the event, genuine objectivity and reflection is often almost non-existent.
This holds true not only for AFP but for a growing number of media outlets as power is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands and the great game becomes increasingly competitive and cut-throat.

More of the TT is that much of what "goes out" on any large news agency's so-called wires, or even gets shown on television by huge networks, is mind-numbingly boring. Vast quantities of non-information or ill-digested facts purport to be "news".
Yet wasting time even on such copy as that requires an alertness and an attention to accuracy which are highly stressful and cumulatively exhausting. Some confirm to me that they wake thinking the job, do the job, spend hours, daily, recovering from the job.
Again, in the name of competition and of profit.
I've seen ruthless and arrogant people make their way rapidly up through various media hierarchies because they know how to pretend to believe in this absurd game and "play it right" in their own self-centred interests.
I've seen a growing and disturbing number of others quit in disgust, often to do something they find a little more honourable, one or two changing profession completely.
And I have seen a very brave handful with the guts and persistence to take on "the system" and do their utmost to change it and improve it, along with the lives and careers of those in their charge.
For their kind, I have tremendous respect.
It's perhaps a resigned majority of ordinary, decent journalists who tell themselves that "this is how things are and it can't be otherwise. Why should it? It never was and never will be."

In all these observations, I'm not targetting those I've worked with, at AFP and elsewhere, whom I know to be honest, responsible and competent people. Indeed, I'm back alongside some people who daily perform duties with quite as much responsibility as my own, for but a fraction of what I earn.
It's no revelation or outrageous breach of trust to say that AFP is financially right up against the wall. The news regularly splashes out over media pages of the press. Along with reports that the most defenceless stringers in the most badly run of bureaux can expect little succour or help. The most vulnerable are the least supported.

But I'm no crusader. That outrageous, irresponsible arrogance and naïvety in today's world, is the domain of its Bushes, its Blairs and its Bin Ladens.
Such tedious, dangerous people!
If change there must be, it's closer to home.

The very great War poet Wilfred Owen unfailingly "did his duty" and yet had to write of the gas-drowned man:

"If in some smothering dream, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, (...)
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."
(Link to a good First World War poetry site.)

We are not alone. Reuters has seen mounting troubles, many lay-offs. The BBC World website regularly makes sloppy mistakes, though no "shoestring" operation. But neither of those institutions have fat-cat press barons as both clients and members of the board of governors, setting tariffs to suit themselves.
Privatisation is no solution at all, now less than ever. Some French equivalent of a licence fee, though almost unimaginable in this country, could, possibly, help...

I feel like Tim Roth in the role of the phenomenal pianist born in the engine room of a great cruise liner in that heart-stirring and memorable film 'The Legend of 1900' (by Giuseppe Tornatore, 1998).
Seen twice on the big screen -- perhaps thrice, I forget! -- that movie can be a metaphor for a sort of sanity, a creative spirit surviving on an ocean of wrongs and injustice, where he also sees the tremendous hope that is part of our humanity come ... and go.
When challenged to walk the gangplank himself, cross on to the "solid" ground of a world no more real than his own on the ship, but different ... well, if you've not seen this film, I can only recommend it.

The moment comes to us all, whether influenced by eastern thinking or not, when we acutely sense that we have but the one life. Some of us are much luckier than others in the exercise of choice and freedom of will as to what we do with the rest of it.
I have no financial reserves, but I'm still among the very lucky ones.

I have some serious thinking to do."