Bravo to Daryn Kagan

I've known for some time that former CNN anchor Daryn Kagan was working on a new media project emphasizing positives in the world. I hope this project is successful and provides a wake-up call to much of the rest of the American and international press.

Among other things, Kagan believes the American press by and large focuses on the negative in their news coverage. Current CNN Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr recently argued that death and difficulty in Iraq are more 'newsworthy' than peace and progress. She made this comment when questioned about why the press hasn't covered successes in Iraq with the same zeal that they've covered failures. She didn't dispute that news coverage of the successes in Iraq was far more muted than the reporting of the debacles. To the contrary, she justified the slant by saying that negative events are more newsworthy than positive events. Starr's attitude is regretably typical, and is widespread in newsrooms that produce the daily and even hourly news we see on air and in print. Enter Daryn Kagan.

Kagan is correctly trying to offer some balance to the media obsession with the negative. Kagan intends to focus on the positive, and showing 'the possible' to offset the refraining groan of the impossible that feeds most media outlets. Kagan correctly believes that most media outlets do not cover matters of faith and spirituality well, and she also knows that positive news stories are often perceived as fluff and not 'hard news' by the mainline media monopoly. Her new media project provides a needed corrective.

For a number of years now, I have argued that the American media woefully underrepresents viewpoints and perspectives that deviate from accepted journalistic norms. The issue of jadedness is a classic example. At best, an inquisitive questioner might get a journalist or columnist to admit that he/she is a bit jaded as a personal matter. But these jaded journalists rarely if ever admit that their jadedness impacts their job or influences the way in which they present a story to the public. And herein lies the problem. Such a view is either completely arrogant or completely self-delusional - or both. Human beings are not machines, where our biases, predispositions, and worldviews can be shut off at the switch when we go about our daily lives, including our vocational lives. The worldview and perspective that a journalist personally operates with will inevitably influence their approach to a story, the kinds of questions they ask (and don't ask), and the kinds of stories they consider 'newsworthy' (or 'unnewsworthy'). Positive and inspirational news stories are considered 'soft' not because they are soft, but because journalists for the most part are bringing their personal jaded perspectives to bear on the job they do.

That they are either unaware or flippant about how their default settings shape the news reveals the core problem in American journalism - the inability for journalists to be straight with themselves, which inevitably compromises their ability to be straight with the public. The press is out of touch with the American experience primarily because they are out of touch with the human experience. Occasionally, someone comes along who momentarily breaks through the cynicism and jadedness (Obama and JFK come to mind). When this happens, the press momentarily rediscovers its idealism and lurches almost completely into worship mode. But this isn't any more balanced than their jadedness, and it shows. The recent SNL skit resonated because even though it was a parody, it hit on something real and obvious - obvious to everyone but press people.

Daryn Kagan is offering a more systematic corrective that will hopefully bring positive stories (and a more positive perspective) back into the stream of media orthodoxy. It's a shame that such a glaring hole exists in our present news coverage, and that the supposedly objective media can't come to grips with how the existence of this gap exposes the rank subjectivity of their enterprise. But I hope that Kagan's initiative will start a substantive conversation within media circles about the deficiencies that exist and how the personal groupthink perspectives of these circles reinforce the deficiencies. Bravo to Kagan for charting a different yet much needed course.