In the months leading up to the election, I, like most, was dying for it all to be over because I was sick of hearing about it. News articles clogged up my timeline, my newsfeed, my inbox, my workspace and everything in between. Every day I read a variation of the same thing from the biggest media outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New Yorker, The Guardian and so on and so forth. And every day my thought was that maybe when the election was over, journalists would stop being so lazy and find something else to write about. As it turns out they haven't.
Well-versed articles with depth and thought and research used to fill my timeline. They were well-written, insightful and on a variety of topics. I read about world news, sports, psychology, race, feminism, art, travel and a dash of politics.
The media ruined this election. They gave too much attention to the things that weren't important. Every day dozens of articles crowded my internet space about things like tweets and emails. Rarely, if ever, did I find a thoughtful piece on actual policy. And even worse, media became unreliable.
CNN became downright stupid to watch. Arguing, fighting, yelling - nothing relevant was ever talked about and the worst part was that people took what the network said as truth. And the same thing happened in written media too.
It became bias and opinionated and started parading those opinions as facts. Instead of well-thought pieces, each article became just another rant. Whether it was liberal or conservative media, it was all unreliable. It's as if facts don't matter anymore.
The post-election world, unfortunately, is no different. A litter of fiction passes off as facts. People don't know the difference between the two; sometimes I don't either. A clutter of opinions with no substance. A focus on the things that don't matter - a world where every media outlet is reporting on what the cast of Hamilton said instead of curating pieces on what the 100-day policies may look like in action.
But even more so, there is more going on in the world than this election. Every major media outlet doesn't need to be reporting on the same thing. Some of the reporting we don't even need. That protest you're reporting? We already saw it on Twitter. What the Hamilton cast said? The video is circulating on Facebook. All of this fake news is unnecessary. Tweets are not an appropriate story to cover, unless of course, it's a Buzzfeed listicle for fun.
Media seems to have lost its place in the world. It needs to be reminded of what its job is. It's to inform and educate - and that's not what it's doing.
The media has gotten embarrassingly lazy, embarrassingly unreliable and embarrassingly painful to read. The stories are terrible, the writing is terrible and worst of all - half of it isn't important - if it's even true.
The craft of writing died with this election, and I'm still here waiting for it to be over.
Can we get back to some substantive writing, please? Can we talk once again about multiculturalism, the future of the global economy, education improvements, art, music, sports, anything? Please?
