LEARNING HOW TO REPORT THE NEWS

With Trump out and Biden in, the press with its hard questions and “in your face” style of disrespectful comments and questions have suddenly disappeared. Did they suddenly learn better? Did they all take an NLP course on effective information gathering and reporting? Sadly no. In its place they have replaced one form of dysfunction with another. Now they have a sickening sycophant pawning — asking, at best, softball questions and doing the work of justifying the actions of the president. The contrast is as shark as day and night; heaven and hell.

The shame of it all is that the press is supposed to be the watchdog for all politicians and should not take sides. But the American press, for the most part, does not and has not for the past ten years. One result is that everything reported here is repeated verbatim internationally so that anyone outside of the US is getting a severely biased account and really does not have a clue as to what’s really going on.

Once upon a time journalists did journalism— they presented the facts, and only the facts, and let the listening public interpret what they meant. Today they editorialize and refuse to even acknowledge that’s what they are doing. Once upon a time, they knew the difference between descriptive language that was sensory based and empirical and evaluative language that reflects the values and perspectives of the speaker. But no longer! What they need is some good NLP training in communication.

Once upon a time journalists would be ashamed of presenting proganda and calling it news. But no longer. But that’s mostly what the new programs today are doing. These days I watch the news with my TV clicker so that I go back and forth between the mainstream media (ABC, NBC, CNN) and Fox and Fox Business. The contrast is pretty drastic.

This past week there was a case that highlighted the difference between propaganda and actual empirical news. The young disturbed man, who had a tremendous sexual compulsion shot 9 people in Atlanta and killed seven of them, was immediately arrested. He confessed to the crime. He said he did it to stop himself from being tempted to go and have sex (a terrible strategy for avoiding temptation!). When asked if it was racially motivated, he said no. Apparently that had not even crossed his mind. That the workers in the Spa happened to be young Asia women, however, was jumped on by the mainstream media and that became ‘the story.’ Here the bias of the press to interpret anything through the lens of racism overshadowed the true facts in the case. Now the press was off and running with the story they preferred, even though it was entirely made up and ignored the facts.

Non-biased and non-partisan journalism used to be the saving grace in the US. Precisely because journalists did not take sides, it served the function of holding politicians accountable. That’s a

good thing. But when journalism itself becomes contaminated with its own biases, then every news agency becomes a voice of propaganda ... and all of us are worse for it.

Learning to report the news sounds like something just for journalists. It is not. You and I do that ourselves. We do it every time we come home from work and talk about what happened. We do it whenever we get with others and someone asks, “So what’s been happening with you?” Even kids get into this one when we ask them about their day at school.

Further, reporting the news is the beginning of knowledge. First, the facts— the details, the empirical see-hear-feel facts that can be verified, then the interpretation. Whoever gets that mixed up, or turns that around, is doing something destructive to their ability to think straight, reason intelligently, and develop high level concepts that bring understanding into the world.

This is not rocket science. It is the process for how we legitimately learn and come to comprehend our world. It is the scientific method itself. First the facts, then the interpretation. If you take that as your mantra, you have the foundation for resolving conflicts, the foundation for leadership, the foundation for creativity and innovation, the foundation for effective communication. So many things depend on it.

This is also the foundation of NLP. In trying to figure out the “secret of the magic” of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir, the founders went back to the basics. What was Fritz and Virginia noticing, saying, and doing? One thing both were doing was distinguishing descriptions from evaluations. Why? Because they were working with therapy clients— they noticed that part of the distortions people suffered started with confusing description with evaluation. That population tended to live in the world of evaluation and didn’t know how to get out of it. Fritz and Virginia brought them back to the real world. “Lose your mind and come to your senses” was the way Fritz phrased it. Virginia did so by distinguishing the “languages of the mind” (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, that by the way is where the founders got the VAK).

If the journalists are no longer doing it— then all of us have to do it. We have to get back to the facts and report the news before we promote the interpretation. May it be so.