Media calls evil anything but what it is

Evil is harm but the media calls it anything but. Harm is not sexy. Harm is banal. Harm is what injures and maims and kills.

Want an example? Scanning the headlines regarding Trump's Jerusalem speech, a clear incentive to harm and therefore evil, we find headlines that do not suggest Trump consciously laid a basis for the outbreak of violence. But that's what he did.

The world's purpose is to create peace and make life possible and even fulfilled for all its residents, and we have a huge resistance to facing news as what truly harms and calling what it is.

Loving conflict

The media loves conflict. It eats it three meals a day. But conflict is merely win-or-lose, this-or-that. To determine harm one has to ask questions. A report worth its salt would at least refer back to the harmful effects of Trump's many incitements.

To reckon with Trump, #Shakespeare would need to update Hamlet's "to be or not to be" which seems to think that only fear of our death accounts for moral cowardice. Trump demonstrates that moral cowardice is, these days, the standard for politics. Harm is rampant but rarely called out for what it is.

Media method

The method of our binary media does not involve seeing things as good or evil. Diversity is a good excuse for saying we cannot judge.

But there are absolutes that cut through all diversities and hold everything we do up to judgment. That is why we remember the maxim of Jesus that by our fruits we are known. That is also why "Hamlet" is is a tragedy.

Media should always ask the ethical question about every event that it covers. It should ask what the sources of harm are.

If pollution kills, then coverage of Koch should note that it is among the major polluters of the planet. If we look at past presidents we should account for the harm their actions have led to.

Great editors are instinctively triadic, thinking outside the box.

Closing down ethics

Binary thinking automatically excludes ethics as a living reality that always has relevance to every decision we make.

Binary thinking has two stages. Whatever the subject is -- Jerusalem for example. And whatever the question is -- to move Israel's government.

#Triadic thinking would start with the question of moving Israel's government. It would ask whether it is a tolerant action. Whether it will help the situation -- will it enable things, will it lead to more awareness? Is it democratic -- does it serve the needs of all concerned? If it is harmful to suggest moving it, that would be noted. Only after allowing ethics into the consideration would there be an action.

We are far from being a world where all persons think this way but that is what it will take to truly reduce harm.