What’s that, Cracker Jack?? Another article about the US election coverage?
Can we cover major events such as elections without scaring ourselves?
So it has been hard for me trying to be creative under the current situation(s) the planet is finding itself in. But alas, one should be sticking to some sort of vocational routine outside of getting up, eating breakfast, doing workouts, showering, and cooking those nutritional meals.
Before I proceed, please put chipotle paste, pre-roasted jars of peppers and a tin of refried beans in your chili pot. They are low in calories and you will thank me for it.
When the world gets crazy, I tend to go into hermit mode. I am an empath and when there is a lot of conflicting emotions, and high-octane energy in the air, I shut down (with my insides getting all irritable bowl syndrome-y).
I think this is because I have an inate need to completely remove myself from dramatic situations. And the people that create them.
Before I had another round of counselling during my masters, I would think the correct response to stressful group work would be to add to the dialogue in order to insert my solution, opinion, or exclaimation.
But I don’t think that this served me well. Instead of feeling like I was understood, I just felt more marginalised, with my hormones adding to potential physical negative symptoms.
So I decided to remove myself from the conversation as much as I could. I even stopped listening in on it.
And this is where I have a negative outlook on the mainstream news rooms at the moment. Because if you think that this high-octaine, rollercoaster dialogue can have a negative result on your internal world, think about what it does to the people around you.
US news networks have had a 24 hour rolling news feed of each of the latest counts of the US presidential election since this Wednesday.
If you haven’t heard!
For the last while, until yesterday when I just had to retweet a cute video of an English toddler waving and saying hello to his non-existant locked-down neighbours, I’ve been pretty much not on Twitter. This is what Twitter used to prominently be:
There’s just too much pressure on there to fit in and be cool these days.
But I have been reluctantly logging on to see what my favourite journalists have been saying about what they see on CNN and the likes.
And flaming Nora do I feel like the whole reporting style of keeping tabs on the rolling counts fluctuations to be a toxic way of delivering information.
But what is more toxic is to be a sheep, joining in on the round-the-clock, burn-your-eyes, keeping glued to the news screens as the election result draws ever near.
I’ve used the Headspace meditation app in the past, and particularly it’s anxiety-regulating sessions. In this app, the guide tells me to simply note the thoughts and emotions that come in to my head, but not to react to them. Simply to watch them going by.
I wondered if this could be adapted to the viewing of the news updates; both in traditional media and Twitter. I don’t think so.
I think the US presidency has had such a global influence on political trends in other countries these past four years, and its influence towards the negative aspects of the human condition has felt as personal on Irish shores as it has in the US.
I don’t wish to be disrespectful to the lived experience of US citizens but dang has the mood of the planet been horrendous since Trump was inaugurated.
I am priveledged that I live in Ireland.
The highs and lows of the rolling election reports and the exclaimation of other journalists tweeting about the latest election victories for Biden in individual states has been a bit toxic.
This isn’t like watching Strictly Come Dancing every weekend finding out if our favourite contestent has made it to the next round. This is real life.
We operate in a globalised society now.
At the time of typing, the reports are saying Biden is winning but what if by some last minute chance the current president remains in office?
We can’t get people’s hopes up with some happy tweet of saying Biden has won some swing state. We’re not in the count centre.
We can’t toy with people’s emotions like that.
We’re basically gaslighting ourselves when we do that, and the news is too when it’s drumming up so much adrenaline in us as different statistics and changing blue and red map and bar chart ratios flash before our eyes.
When you have people around you- your spouse, friends, colleagues, and viewers- living on tenterhooks like that, what you’re doing is gaslighting.
And don’t get me started on Donald Trumps’ tantrums this week and behavour that he developed to impress his own father as far back as a young child.
You just don’t know where you stand with him on any given day. One day he’s all gameshow smiles, the next he’s raining down on you with precious inflexible boy anger, where now, he hasn’t got his way.
And the news is offering us constant information that feels just like that.
His leadership has also felt divisive, and the media has had no problem in facilitating this. Thankfully ABC, CBS and NBC had the good sense to cut away from this tantrum held at the highest office in one of the biggest nations on this planet.
Sometimes we engage with our fellow humans well.
Take Dolly Parten, for instance. The well known country singer has an inviting demanour about her. She’s a hostess with the mostess to her audience when she performs her concerts.
But she has also led a career that has involved numerous interviews with the press over the years, and she has engaged with this press with such grace.
In her documentary Here I Am which you can watch on Netflix, she comes across as a woman who treats not only her fans with dignity, but the press too. She engages in a psychology that sees the profession of journalism as having humans at the other end of the microphone/pen/camera.
And she uses the power of music.
We all know that music has the power to deliver the message in a way emotionally driven conversation can’t.
And Dolly Parten uses her talent to this advantage.
For example, the words sung in ‘9 to 5' are about the everyday struggles we have with our careers:
Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living
Barely getting by, it’s all taking and no giving
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it
With the upbeat tempo and atmosphere that drives the rhythm and melody, she inspires in us an enthusiastic motivation to help us see that things could be better.
Sticking to what she knows, and the consistency and certainty she conveys in her engagement with the public, she steers clear of divisiveness.
This month last year she also released to Netflix ‘Dolly Parten’s Heartstrings’, an eight-part series in which she uses the narritive of a song-per-episode from her back catalogue, with new cast members each episode to dive into topics of discussion that are often hard for loved ones to talk about.
After discovering just quite how cool she is just this year, I began watching it this week as a way to distract myself from all the stresses of lockdown 2.0, the US election, and the latest controversy of our Irish governmental leadership.
At first, my motivation for watching it was because of the lighthearted nature of her music style. Little did I know it would have such hard-topic subtance to it.
But boy does she deliver good story-telling. The story has all the hallmarks of a soap opera, but avoids the toxic Red Top tabloid rabitt hole that say the likes of East Enders go down.
Topics included are interracial relationships, abortion, classism, marriage woes, family dynamics, friendship as experienced by adults, religious faith, and so much more.
The heartwarming element of the story telling makes the topics much more digestable, and the story arc gently invites you in as opposed to bombarding you with a message straight up in your face in the first few scenes.
And I’ll bet you that this was down to the leadership quality of Ms Parten.
I recently saw a post on a family member’s Facebook page where the quote is:
leaders don’t force people to follow them, they invite them on the journey
The series does that; her songs do that.
I don’t see that the 24 hour news cycle of this week’s election count has been digestible the way Dolly Parten has managed to make the topics she highlights on her show and in her songs.
And her respectful, non-divisiveness consistency with the press and her fans is far from the techniques people use under the behaviour of gaslighting.
That’s my two cents on the coverage of the US election this week.
My closing question is, when we come to the crucial moments in history, can we, the media, be a bit more gentle to our audience, like Dolly Parten is with hers and not have them going through such an emotional rollercoaster?