16 min
The Secret to Staying Positive in Dark Times: A BBC Report Fresh Dialogues
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- Society & Culture
I hope you and yours are staying well despite the violent insurrection in Washington DC on January 6th. This week, I want to bring you some hope and optimism for the future from an unlikely source. More on that below.
First, I’d like to share two insights that resonated with me as I sought to make sense of the attempted coup and think about a pathway forward.
The first is from our newly elected Georgia Senator, Raphael Warnock. PBS’s Judy Woodruff asked how we can get anything done with such a divided country and Senate. Warnock said “we have no choice!” and added this:
“Either we will learn to live together as sisters and brothers, or we will perish together as fools.” Martin Luther King Jr. speech in St. Louis, on March 22, 1964 (In Warnock’s version he added the sisters. Amen to that.)
And Warnock posed this key question: Do we want to continue in our silos of violent racial, political and religious hatred, or do we want to build what Dr. King called the beloved community?
The other resonant voice for me was President Barack Obama. He laid the blame firmly with Trump and his enablers. I felt that he was also speaking directly to me and all my fellow journalists when he wrote: “For two months now, a political party and its accompanying media ecosystem has too often been unwilling to tell their followers the truth…” Obama offered Republican leaders a choice: to either continue down a dark path or “choose reality…and choose America”
Although the majority of the media blame rests with Fox News, Sean Hannity, and all those media and social media platforms that allowed the false narrative of a “stolen election” to be amplified, every single journalist should examine his or her actions over the last four years. For example, NPR’s failing to call a lie a lie was a mistake in my view. Mary Louise Kelly explained “A lie is a false statement made with intent to deceive… Without the ability to peer into Donald Trump’s head, I can’t tell you what his intent was.”
I think the events of last week make that intent to deceive –– and win at all costs –– abundantly clear.
By contrast, the BBC, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets used the word “lie” when it was merited, countless times. Yet even some highly regarded colleagues inadvertently fueled the fire by demonstrating lazy journalism. On January 8th, the BBC’s North America editor, Jon Sopel’s retweet of Trump’s lies about a stolen election, without clearly flagging it as a lie, was a powerful case in point. A few hours later, Twitter finally gave Trump the red card he deserved months ago, but the damage was done. Sopel and those like him need to follow the plea of New York Times journalists like Sheera Frenkel and think carefully about how they use their powerful media megaphones.
Statements from other political elders like Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and George W Bush are also worth reading. Which brings me to my latest BBC report.
When I read that Americans over 70 are showing remarkable resilience and optimism during this pandemic and lockdown, I thought, how can that be? We all know that the older you are, the more likely that Covid-19 can kill you, but here’s a fascinating statistic: in the United States, an 85 year-old grandmother who gets Covid is 10,000 times more at risk of death than her 15 year-old grandchildren. With odds like that, and the lockdown isolation you’d think that she’d be a lot more anxious and depressed than them, especially with the post-holiday spike in cases and prolonged lockdowns.
Instead, I discovered compelling research that demonstrates that the reverse is true. And found some valuable truths and life lessons for you and me.
Due to time constraints, the BBC wasn’t able to air all of the insights of the wise 19 year-old I interviewed, so I’m adding his wisdom at the end of this transcript and on the Fresh Dialogues podcast.
Listen to [...]
I hope you and yours are staying well despite the violent insurrection in Washington DC on January 6th. This week, I want to bring you some hope and optimism for the future from an unlikely source. More on that below.
First, I’d like to share two insights that resonated with me as I sought to make sense of the attempted coup and think about a pathway forward.
The first is from our newly elected Georgia Senator, Raphael Warnock. PBS’s Judy Woodruff asked how we can get anything done with such a divided country and Senate. Warnock said “we have no choice!” and added this:
“Either we will learn to live together as sisters and brothers, or we will perish together as fools.” Martin Luther King Jr. speech in St. Louis, on March 22, 1964 (In Warnock’s version he added the sisters. Amen to that.)
And Warnock posed this key question: Do we want to continue in our silos of violent racial, political and religious hatred, or do we want to build what Dr. King called the beloved community?
The other resonant voice for me was President Barack Obama. He laid the blame firmly with Trump and his enablers. I felt that he was also speaking directly to me and all my fellow journalists when he wrote: “For two months now, a political party and its accompanying media ecosystem has too often been unwilling to tell their followers the truth…” Obama offered Republican leaders a choice: to either continue down a dark path or “choose reality…and choose America”
Although the majority of the media blame rests with Fox News, Sean Hannity, and all those media and social media platforms that allowed the false narrative of a “stolen election” to be amplified, every single journalist should examine his or her actions over the last four years. For example, NPR’s failing to call a lie a lie was a mistake in my view. Mary Louise Kelly explained “A lie is a false statement made with intent to deceive… Without the ability to peer into Donald Trump’s head, I can’t tell you what his intent was.”
I think the events of last week make that intent to deceive –– and win at all costs –– abundantly clear.
By contrast, the BBC, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets used the word “lie” when it was merited, countless times. Yet even some highly regarded colleagues inadvertently fueled the fire by demonstrating lazy journalism. On January 8th, the BBC’s North America editor, Jon Sopel’s retweet of Trump’s lies about a stolen election, without clearly flagging it as a lie, was a powerful case in point. A few hours later, Twitter finally gave Trump the red card he deserved months ago, but the damage was done. Sopel and those like him need to follow the plea of New York Times journalists like Sheera Frenkel and think carefully about how they use their powerful media megaphones.
Statements from other political elders like Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and George W Bush are also worth reading. Which brings me to my latest BBC report.
When I read that Americans over 70 are showing remarkable resilience and optimism during this pandemic and lockdown, I thought, how can that be? We all know that the older you are, the more likely that Covid-19 can kill you, but here’s a fascinating statistic: in the United States, an 85 year-old grandmother who gets Covid is 10,000 times more at risk of death than her 15 year-old grandchildren. With odds like that, and the lockdown isolation you’d think that she’d be a lot more anxious and depressed than them, especially with the post-holiday spike in cases and prolonged lockdowns.
Instead, I discovered compelling research that demonstrates that the reverse is true. And found some valuable truths and life lessons for you and me.
Due to time constraints, the BBC wasn’t able to air all of the insights of the wise 19 year-old I interviewed, so I’m adding his wisdom at the end of this transcript and on the Fresh Dialogues podcast.
Listen to [...]
16 min