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At UPBEAT
Entertainment News Syndicate, we are fully aware that
readers yearn for more humanity in their news and
information and sadly... they find not enough of it; they
yearn for stories crafted with compassion, light-hearted
humor and a genuine caring that reflect a reality they
know exists; it's just rarely visited. These same readers
know that brilliantly executed stories can help them
through a day that understanding the adversity others
endure and mostly rise above broadens their own lives and
elevates their spirits. As much as anything, those stories
shape and bind a community... and in doing so, create a
far more objective and nurturing world. We also define and
give voice to this world by bringing clarity to mainstream
complexity.
Success is an inside job and the secrets to getting
anything you want in life is found within these four basic
elements, your heart, you integrity, your intuition and
your compassionate clarity.
Clarity is the ability to give attention, and to give it when needed. It
means always having access to a clear channel in the mind.
Clarity is the irreplaceable skill that underlies all
efforts at research and reporting, for without clarity,
you look at the world and see either yourself reflected
back, or a muddled haze. Ideal clarity means seeing
without preconceptions, without agendas, without filters,
without interpretations. It means just being there, and
being there fully, with all the skills and purposes of a
journalist. Curiosity is the active form of clarity, the
form that asks, that goes out and looks, that returns for
a second look. Another aspect of clarity leads to
openness, to freshness of perception, to the ability to
recognize that no two things are ever alike, no two people
ever do the same things. This is the clarity of innocence.
To maintain clarity, journalists have to renew their
ability to see— to see doubly as both adult and child; to
see at once in the full context of everything you have
ever known, and yet to see as if for the first time, anew.
Journalists have to live with exactly what they
learn. Unless they anticipate this need, they may find
that the very clarity of vision that makes good
journalists also leads them toward cynicism, irony,
disillusion, detachment, or just a long empty relativism.
Like medical students, journalists may go through a
spiritual crisis as they learn more about human beings
than they can assimilate. Few other people have to know so
very much— especially so many disconcerting things— about
being human.
Seeing too much too clearly easily leads one to a
world-weary attitude. Journalists may oscillate between an
aloof superiority from which they criticize, and the grimy
guilt that comes from turning their pitiless honesty upon
their own imperfect selves. Clarity needs yet another
innate skill to help to manage it all. Compassion can help
sustain and renew the task of repeatedly seeing oneself
and others in the nakedness of truth. Compassion begins
with the deep and repeated awareness of one's own web of
self-delusion and imperfection, learning to look upon
one's lumpiness gently, kindly. From this self-kindness,
one can learn to look upon others kindly— not ignoring
anything, not softening their failures, not ignoring their
destructiveness. Seeing it all, seeing it clearly, seeing
it from the perspective of the other person, and feeling
compassion. Compassion requires clear seeing, and clarity
of vision can be sustained through compassion.
The real
bad
news for brand-name entertainment journalism may be that a
"credibility faux pas" is now pretty much what people have
come to expect. It's tempting for journalists always to
believe the worst, especially about themselves and their
profession. The skepticism that's either inbred or learned
in the business can only too easily curdle into a cynicism
that eventually "eats its own".
Then
again,
scratch
an ink-stained or cyber cynic, and you'll often find a
temporarily disillusioned idealist, even an inviolable
optimist underneath. Journalism is ultimately an act of
faith, both for those who create it and those who consume
it in any form. We all believe, at some level, that the
truth is not only worth pursuing but even— occasionally
and imperfectly— achieved. It is, at best, a precarious
enterprise, a minefield of unforeseen complications,
unexamined motives and multiple ambiguities.
It's
entrusted to a group of people that the general public
tends to regard uneasily to begin with. In the now
infamous scene from "A Few Good Men," Jack Nicholson's
character explodes on the witness stand at the
beleaguering of an aggressively arrogant hot-shot attorney
played by Tom Cruise— "You can't handle the truth!" The
same expostulation— in a different sense— could easily be
directed at the entertainment journalism profession as a
whole. The problem is not that entertainment journalists
can't face the truth [though sometimes that may be true]
but that they can't keep a firm grip on it.
We should
never
delude ourselves into believing what we find is true—
because when push inevitably launches into shove, what one
reads or finds isn’t always the complete truth. We have a
reason to be sad because of entertainment journalists who
are unable to uphold a code of ethics in their reporting.
Instead, these journalists chose to fabricate “sexy”
stories with false facts, fictional datelines and an
unnecessary dose of arrogance or what we like to call
"lofty, unrealistic, moral high grounds". Because
information today is a more complicated experience than it
used to be, the way we think about it must reflect greater
sophistication in understanding its forms, purposes,
effects, and even its reasons or justifications for
existence.
The
entertainment information industry is now built on a
certain quantity of information flow. The daily newspaper
has dozens of pages which must be filled each and every
day— both to please the expectant subscriber and to fill
in the area around the advertisements. The TV news must
fill its allotted time each day. The book publishers have
budgeted costs and printing schedules for a certain number
of books next year. But what if there is no important news
occurring tomorrow, no really thought-provoking book
manuscripts submitted? The space must still be filled—
with whatever is available. With the explosion of the
Internet and the increasing competition with more
magazines, the media content appetite continues to grow
rapidly, ravenously. "Give me content," cries the media
space.
As a
result of these competitive pressures, a number of
otherwise "credible" sources have demonstrated what might
be best called, "Drudge's Law of Information". Bad information
drives out good. Journalism stooping to rumor and tabloid
values to compete with a plethora of sources that do not
necessarily care about the outcome... while there seems to
be more emphasis on persuasion and spin. And more people
than ever write to gratify their egos, keep their jobs, or
make money. Since market and entertainment values are more
important than truth now— if such a thing as truth even
exists in a postmodern world— the reliability of a book is
less important than its entertainment value or its
political ideology or its market value.
This is
EXACTLY where
UPBEAT Entertainment News Syndicate and the rest simply
"part ways"... because, here... we DO care,
we do feel a responsibility to those we interview and
those we care about who “choose” to read our work. Today,
all of us at UPBEAT still write to inform... to bring to
light the facts and show a perspective far less traveled.
Science fiction writer Frank Herbert once BOLDLY said,
""Understanding requires words. Some things cannot be
reduced to words. There are things that can only be
experienced wordlessly... The act of saying that things
exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe
where words are supreme." This is precisely why we have
brought together this relentlessly compassionate group of
"entertainment journalism rebels"... because we are still
determined to shake up and challenge a universe that now
prides itself on the demise of others... and rise above
the rest to that which is truly felt.
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