Imagine turning on the TV news and being greeted with a smiling presenter who says. “Good evening. Everything, everywhere is just hunky-dory. Goodnight.” Or you stop on your way to work to pick up a newspaper. And there, on the front page, is a headline that reads: “The world is tickety-boo”.
For one thing, that’s never likely to happen. And, for another, that’s not how journalism works. It’s not that we look for the bad or amplify the negative. It’s just that, if everything was fine and dandy, it wouldn’t be worth reporting on because that’s how things are supposed to be. Journalism lives in the space between things as they should be, and things as they really are.
On that subject, I received a message on LinkedIn yesterday asking why I was so negative about the industry all the time, and telling me that my coverage of the sector was “disgusting”.
My default reaction was to tell him where to insert his opinion and to point him towards an accurate definition of the word “journalism”. But then I thought about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I should put on my very best rose-tinted spectacles, punch my imagination into overdrive, and to just picture how a perfect day might look if we lived in the same apparently blissful paradise as my LinkedIn critic.
Now, there is no need to strap in. This journey is going to be as smooth as freshly-laid tarmac, devoid of all those nasty pitfalls and potholes that make the real world such a bore.
Let us begin.
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