When the end-of-days feelings get you down, choose up

Indri Robyy, Pixabay

Doom-scrolling is real, and I know to try to avoid it for fear of entering that hyper-vigilant, chronically worried state that can set in when your adrenal system gets worked up. But these days it's hard to find a news feed of any kind that doesn't feel like doom-scrolling. 

Historians hasten to put such gloomy thoughts about "these times" in perspective. They rightly note that in fact, many grand woes of the world are actually lessening. We have less poverty. Fewer nuclear warheads. Less global terrorism. We live longer, having invented cures, treatments and vaccines for many things that used to kill us.

All of that is good news at the big-picture level. But it isn't actually of much comfort to those who are alive in this moment and living in this destabilized state, when flu-stricken birds are falling out of the sky and the Earth is splitting open and every season heralds a new round of record-smashing extreme weather somewhere in the world.  

It's hard to appreciate your moment in time in the Big Picture when your Small Picture is scaring the hell out of you. 

Some of us are living in hellish situations of war and natural disaster while others are just stressed from reading about it, and I don't mean to compare the experiences. But I'd venture that all eight billion of us are feeling the heaviness of these times in one way or another. 

We all need to find our own ways of coping. Some people "check out" and simply don't take in the news, a tempting thought if only our collective alarm wasn't urgently needed to drive change. Nothing gets fixed when people check out. 

Others focus on the here and now. There's no earthquake in Victoria right now, is there? There's no balloon waiting to be shot down in our skies. No sabre-rattling super power getting jacked up about Canada. There's just you and the calm seas and the pretty paper whites, on a mild winter day on a coveted West Coast island.

I like "being present" myself, though I did discover on a road trip last year through California's drought-slammed former nut orchards that it also means bearing witness to whatever is playing out in front of you. 

Driving south through lands I once dreamed of living in only to be confronted with the realities of modern-day California - so, so different from my shiny young-person memories of thriving agriculture as far as the eye could seen and a full-to-the-brim Lake Shasta packed with happy house boaters - was an eye-opener that I haven't been able to shake.

Nor will being present lower stress levels when it involves passing through the pockets of poverty and human suffering that have developed in all of our communities. But it couldn't be more important to be present in those moments, because this hand-wringing state we've been in about social decline for pretty much 30 years now will end only when we shake ourselves awake and act. 

Another reaction to these unsettling times is to go all in, spiralling into an increasing state of rage and paranoia over whatever subject a person has ended up fixated on. 

With so much to fixate on, there are many ways to rage these days. I'm sure we all know someone who has fallen into obsession (and whose company we want less and less of as a result). I know a COVID rager, an anti-vax rager, several Trudeau ragers, and even a few pro-Trump ragers who ignited a few years back and can't seem to cool down.

Unfortunately, there's no problem-fixing going on when people are in a state of rage. That's just a time when we want to break things and yell at people. If you're stuck in a rage state, best to get some help with that. It's costing you friends and your personal health, and not changing a damn thing about whatever has you riled.

How does one go about feeling better in gloomy times? Personally, I seek out news stories about things that are making a difference on the issues facing us. A recent read reminding me that the world did successfully address acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer through collective action was heartening, and important to hold onto in times when all the doom threatens to paralyze us. 

Also good: Buy a copy of The Economist every now and again and get caught up on world news  presented with careful balance, research and thoughtfulness. So different than the hyped-up headlines that a Google News search pulls up.

Speaking of news, I highly recommend severely limiting your intake of that which calls itself "news" in these over-saturated times. 

Back in the day when newspapers were still a thing, I read two a day, mostly limited to goings-on in Victoria, BC and Canada. Now, every bit of bad news going on anywhere in the world is as close as a right-hand swipe on my phone. 

It's so easy to do that swipe in a distracted moment, just like I once used to mindlessly light up a cigarette to pass the time in between this and that. But just like those cigarettes, it's so bad for me. I can feel the worry and the outrage building in me almost immediately, even if I was having a perfectly OK time just minutes before. 

Of course, each of us as citizens of the world also need to be stepping up right now. Avoiding the bad news overload is one thing, but taking action where you can must never be avoided. If you've got anyone you care about who is still going to carry on living after you're dead, surely that's motivation enough to do your part right now to actually address problems where you can rather than just worry about them.

Find the news you can use, and use it. May the rest of it roll off you.

Haters gonna hate - so don't give them the microphone

If Pierre Poilievre was just some random dude with a Twitter account and an uninformed opinion, we could just leave him to it and shrug off his ridiculous view that providing safe consumption sites and non-poisoned drugs for people "will only lead to their ultimate deaths."

Alas, he's not some random dude, he's a man who could actually end up being Canada's prime minister someday. 

So even when he tweets something stupid and wrong, the media pick it up and send it across the country. And the fact of that pickup gives his foolish musings weight among those who already hate any sensible conversation around drugs.

That particular group of people have controlled the illicit drug conversation for almost 70 years, if we want to start the clock at BC's landmark 1956 study of heroin use that largely concluded that harm reduction made a lot more sense than criminalizing users. At what point do the rest of us get to say hey, shuddup already?

BC's poisoned drug supply has killed 10,000 people in the last seven years. That's almost three times the number of deaths from motor vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides and fatal prescription drug overdoses combined. 

Meanwhile, years of careful record-keeping at Canada's safer-consumption sites give us all the proof needed to conclude that such sites save lives and connect people to services. Between 2017-20, some 2.2 million people used the sites and nobody died. 

As for whether a safer drug supply would save lives, of course it would. People are not dying by the thousands because they use drugs, they're dying because the drugs they use are poisoned. 

So why should Poilievre get even a millisecond of media attention for his completely ludicrous assertion that safer-consumption sites and a safer drug supply lead only to people's "ultimate deaths"? Why do the media allow him to "reignite the debate around safe supply," as the Global TV story puts it, by giving his tweet public profile as if he was actually saying something of substance?

Granted, the media did find people to refute Poilievre as they covered the "story" of his disparaging tweet. But the damage is done when you give the guy the top third of a story to spout his harmful nonsense.

Once upon a time, I would have imagined that right-minded people would see through Poilievre's tweet in an instant and that it would have as much impact as the guy sounding off behind me in the grocery store lineup about how COVID-19 is a government conspiracy. 

But in this post-Trump era, I know otherwise. Today's idiot statement can easily end up tomorrow's political policy, because now we are "populist" and prone to taking a shine to people who are as ill-prepared as any of us when it comes to effectively running a city, province or country. We like The Everyman, even when he's a dangerous liar from the privileged class playing the long con.

I relish some day in the distant future when Poilievre's words are seen as the hate speech that they really are, and when media reporting in garden-variety fashion on such blatant untruths is viewed as complicit in the spreading of that hate. 

Many more people will die because the tweet of a man given status as a future political leader will dampen political and public enthusiasm even more for taking action on what is surely one of the most outrageous, preventable tragedies of our times. It doesn't get more hateful than that. 

Consider yourself a journalist? Post your ethics code

No TC column this past week (CanWest cutbacks), but I thought I might fill the blank by posting my personal ethics code as a journalist.
I put it together last fall when I was teaching a journalism course at the University of Victoria. We got into a big discussion one day about ethical behaviour in journalism, and I went home and for the first time wrote down the personal code I followed as a journalist.
In these times of disintegrating mainstream media and anyone-is-a-journalist, I think it's going to be essential for readers/viewers to ask their favourite bloggers and writers to produce their own codes. If we're all going to be getting our news from wildly diverse sources, we'd be wise to understand what principles our news gatherers are using when collecting their information.
Anyone can call themselves a journalist, but there's no association that journalists have to belong to, or code that we have to swear to uphold. So the only thing that separates a conscientious journalist from an irresponsible, muck-raking fiction writer is the internal ethics code that the writer is guided by. Here's mine:

Jody’s personal ethics code:

- Through my own efforts or that of trusted sources, I have done my best to ensure that the information I’m presenting is factual.

- I believe the story I’m writing is in the greater public interest or meets the test of the public’s need to know, and is not merely voyeuristic, sensational or exploitive.

- I have done my best to present all sides of the issues, and have set aside my own personal views in order to provide a fair and balanced story that puts the issues at hand in context for the reader.

- I understand that people may be harmed in some way as a result of my story, but have considered those risks and believe that the greater public good in this case outweighs the risks of individual harm.

- I am familiar with Canada’s laws around libel, defamation and contempt of court, and have done my best to present a story that is not in conflict with those legal issues. Where a story still may be a concern on those fronts, I have notified my editor.

- While I have been very careful to avoid making mistakes of any kind - errors of fact, spelling, geography, timelines, etc - I recognize that mistakes are always a possibility. I take full responsibility for correcting those mistakes quickly, graciously and without malice.

- I identify all sources of information for my readers, and in the rare case when it’s not possible to identify a source, I tell the reader why anonymity is justified.

- I recognize that “facts,” perspectives and knowledge are ever-changing, and am always willing to take another look at an issue or change my mind.

- I do not lie or falsely represent myself to anyone I am seeking information from or interviewing.

- I am proud to put my name to the pieces I write and recognize that my personal reputation is on the line with every story that appears under my byline.

Wane of traditional media leaves information gap

I’ve been slow to slip into Chicken Little mode on the question of whether the Internet will be the death of traditional media. People have asked me about that for at least 15 years now, and for the longest time I assured them the industry would always survive.
But whether it really is the Web or just a sign of the times we live in, there’s not much question anymore that the industry is in the fight of its life.
Blame the recession for some of that. All media rely heavily on advertising dollars, and those dollars aren’t as dependable during tough economic times.
But the bigger problem for the industry is that its readers, viewers and listeners simply don’t want to pay for information about their community anymore.
Even just a couple of decades ago, that would have been unthinkable. Local media outlets were virtually the only way anyone got reliable information about their community and the world. Most households had a subscription to at least one newspaper, a favourite radio station for catching the news of the moment, and a nightly TV newscast they rarely missed.
No more. Now, on-line news from around the world is at the fingertips of anyone who has an Internet connection - which is to say, virtually everyone.
Where once there were local newspapers read daily by almost everyone in town, now there are customized news feeds from thousands of different sources delivered directly to your e-mail inbox. Where once there were popular radio and TV newscasts providing the topics for that day’s water-cooler conversations, now it’s podcasts and YouTube videos and astounding footage from somebody’s cell phone camera.
And hey, maybe such competition will be a good thing in the long run for the traditional media that manage to stay in the game. As the saying goes, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and those that make it through these deeply uncertain times will have a whole new set of strategies for staying relevant.
The impact in the short term, however - well, that’s just a little scary, and not only for people like me who work in the business. How will we talk to each other as a community about the things that matter if the day comes when none of us have any news sources in common?
The Internet is a marvellous vehicle for finding information you want. But what about the information you don’t know you want? Or the information that you ought to want, but aren’t likely to go looking for? Without traditional media, what is the mechanism for getting us news that we need to know?
Those questions go to the heart of what it means to be a community. Don’t get me wrong - I love living in a wired global village. But it’s still traditional media that covers local news best. It’s still traditional media that’s most effective at bringing us together in our own home towns to rally behind a cause, a concern, a crisis.
In the new age of on-line information, we can all become experts in the things that we take an interest in, and active participants in a virtual community of people around the world who think just like us. We can find all the stories we’d ever want to confirm what we already believe.
But our exposure to the stories that might challenge those beliefs, or promote new ways of thinking, will be greatly reduced. On the one hand, the Internet opens up the world as never before; on the other, it narrows it dramatically by placing us into skinny streams of information that don’t accommodate the flow of contrary thought.
Then there’s the fact of the on-line information itself, much of which stems from the reporting work of traditional media. I overheard a woman talking to a friend the other day about why she no longer bothered with a daily paper: “Everybody just gets their news on-line now.”
But much of that news comes from the newsrooms of traditional media, which heavily subsidize the cost of their on-line presence through their other operations. If those operations falter, the news as we know it will falter as well. We may like to gripe about the shortcomings of the media, but life without them is a frightening concept.
When Conrad Black ruled the roost in Canada, people were downright hysterical about the impact of concentrated media ownership on a free press, for what ultimately turned out to be just a blip in the business cycle. Alas, the real bogeyman has arrived.

I wrote a while ago about a media report that really got it wrong about rates of HIV infection among Vancouver sex workers. I alerted University of Victoria professor Cecilia Benoit to the error, as she has done considerable competent research work around sex workers, and she in turn wrote a great piece for Harm Reduction magazine (where the original piece appeared) that sets things straight.

Follow this link to find her response, which serves as a fine reminder that we can't be too careful when reading any research document, not to mention the media's interpretation of it.

Update on HIV/sex worker issue


I noted a couple weeks ago a report on HIV/AIDS that had wrongly been presented in the media as being about all Vancouver sex workers, even though the study had actually involved only street-entrenched and addicted outdoor sex workers in the Downtown Eastside. Here's a March 14 letter from the authors of the study that sets things straight on that subject:


RE: Unintended results of research (14 March 2009)
by Druyts, Hogg, Montaner
British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

We thank Dr. Goodyear for his response to our article. We fully agree with
his concerns surrounding the recent coverage of our work on HIV prevalence
in British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Goodyear has expressed difficulty in
seeing how this study will benefit the individuals who participated in the
research. Of note, estimates of HIV prevalence among at-risk groups are
vital in planning for the development and provision of appropriate policy
and programmatic responses. We wish to affirm that it is our overarching
goal to ensure that there are adequate services for all individuals living
with HIV infection in Vancouver. The WHO has consistently shown that less
than 10% of sex workers have adequate access to HIV prevention and care
resources.

Our paper did not aim to highlight HIV infection among sex workers in
particular. Instead, we sought to model the estimate of HIV prevalence at
the city level and related gaps in services in Vancouver. Also of note,
all the studies considered in our paper received institutional ethical
approval.

We acknowledge that prevalence estimates are rarely perfect and are
limited by uncertainty surrounding population size and potential biases
inherent in source data. We would like to clarify that the estimate of HIV
prevalence among female sex workers in 2006 is based on data collected
among survival sex workers predominantly located in Vancouver’s Downtown
Eastside, who live in poverty and all who inject and/or smoke illicit
drugs. This estimate therefore does not reflect indoor sex workers, such
as sex workers in establishment-based venues, bars, or escort services. We
are fully aware that female sex workers in Vancouver do not constitute a
homogeneous group. This could have been further stressed in the published
paper.

Perhaps most importantly, we recognize that sex workers have been unfairly
stigmatized in the past by medical research as vectors of disease, and it
was not our intention to perpetuate this in any way. We have acknowledged
in our article that detailed data on sex work clients were not available.
As a global assessment of HIV prevention needs, our article did not seek
to review the factors that enhance vulnerability to HIV infection among
marginalized populations, such as survival sex workers. However, as
mentioned by Dr. Goodyear, we feel it is important to acknowledge that
many pivotal studies both in Canada, including some of our own, and
globally have demonstrated that criminalized sex work legislation,
enforcement-based strategies and violence greatly reduces sex workers’
ability to safely negotiate condom use with clients as well as other HIV
risk reduction strategies.

Finally, we concur with UNAIDS and WHO that structural approaches to HIV
prevention are crucial both for the health of sex workers and clients.
This includes policy changes such as the removal of criminal sanctions
targeting sex workers.

Eric Druyts, Robert Hogg and Julio Montaner

http://www.harmreductionjournal.com/content/6/1/5/comments

Sadly, I've had to give up some of my regular Friday columns, due to cutbacks to the freelance budget at the Times Colonist. I won't be writing for the first Friday of the month anymore.

It's bothering me more than I would have expected, but so it goes. Change always ends up being a positive thing, in my experience, but that's not to say it ever starts out pleasantly.

I've never seen the media industry in such a state. Where's it all going? Nowhere good for the immediate future, and for the industry as it currently exists. But something new will rise from the ashes, and perhaps it's time.

My wish would be for a return to smaller, locally owned media. I never got to experience that during my career, because the Thompson corporation owned all the small papers I was working at in my early years, and since then it's been Southam, Hollinger and Canwest in rapid succession. But I've always thought that would be the model with the most potential for understanding the kind of news that a particular community needs to know.

If there does end up being a fire sale of Canadian media properties, what's stopping a few locals from coming together to start their own media outlet? The business is still profitable for the most part. I can see from the chaos in the industry that things are really going to have to change, but the business of media is far from a lost cause.

People are always going to need information. Communities are always going to need a way for their citizens to talk to each other about issues of shared concern. The Internet is a marvelous place, but it can't meet all our needs. I've always thought the best thing about a good newspaper is that it tells you about things you didn't know you wanted to know about, something that a self-directed Internet news search simply isn't as likely to do.

I've met a lot of young people who don't read any news media. That scares me. But at the same time, I'm as tired of "the news" as anybody else.

Mostly that's because it's the wrong news for me. If it were up to me, I wouldn't choose to be kept up to date on every death, fire, car crash, grotesque act, and tragic turn of event in Canada. I get that I need to know about foreign wars and politics, but surely there's a better way of doing it.

But in between the irrelevant stories, I still find great, compelling, important information in our media. I still love newspapers. So I'm sure hoping that what comes out of all of this crashing about in the industry at the end of the day is more of what's great about it and much, much less of what's not.

Anyway. Hang in for the transformation.

Media wrong to conspire in hiding kidnapping news

Best wishes to Mellisa Fung, the intrepid CBC reporter who was released last week from what must have been a horrific and traumatic month imprisoned in a cave in Afghanistan.
She’s safe, and I’m very glad to hear that. But what are we to make of recent word that the world’s media reached a private agreement to keep her kidnapping a secret until now? With no disrespect to Fung or those who wanted to keep her safe, I’m stunned by the news.
As happy as we are to have Fung back, the truth is that most of us didn’t even know she was missing. That’s because in a most unusual development, the global media agreed from the outset not to report on her high-profile kidnapping.
It’s easy to get caught up in the spirit of the moment and see the media’s decision as evidence of the industry finally thinking about whether it’s helping or hurting with the way it covers the news. “We must put the safety of the victim ahead of our normal instinct for full transparency and disclosure,” CBC News publisher John Cruikshank said of the international decision to keep Fung’s kidnapping secret.
But why now? Why just this once? If we keep people safer by suppressing the news of their kidnappings, then why the wide-open, no-holds-barred coverage of all the other cases of kidnapping that have taken place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan in recent years? What made the media act differently this time out?
On first blush, you might presume that what’s different this time around is that a journalist is the victim. A quick search through five years of electronic newspaper archives puts that one to rest, however. Media outlets around the world continue to report all the details of the many kidnappings going on these days, including of journalists such as Alberta’s Amanda Lindhout, missing in Somalia since August.
So what’s special about the Fung case? Was it that she worked for the CBC? That she had friends in high places? That the federal government was two days away from an election at the time of her kidnapping?
The Globe and Mail wrote several thousand interesting words on the subject in Monday’s paper, but I never did find the answer.
Media bosses interviewed in the Globe piece were clearly aware that they’d done something very unusual in maintaining silence for a month about Fung’s kidnapping. They argued that they chose that course out of fear that Fung would be killed. Canadian Press policy on news about kidnapping and terrorism states “no news story is worth someone’s life,” CP editor-in-chief Scott White noted.
Absolutely. But how often has the same courtesy been extended to other kidnap victims? From my experience, virtually never. Poor Amanda Lindhout’s kidnapping was being loudly reported around the world within hours of her disappearance four months ago. What’s different this time?
“Editors exist to exercise their discretion about what should be published and in what way,” comments Globe editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon in his paper’s piece.
Fair enough. But with such power comes the responsibility to do so with excruciating fairness. Media integrity hinges on the public’s perception that news is reported with more or less of an even hand.
That’s a vital principle. The industry earns the public’s trust by treating every person at the centre of a news story in identical fashion. The idea is that we’re all equal before the media, for better or worse.
If the decision to keep Fung’s kidnapping a secret is the start of a more self-aware media recognizing the impact that thoughtless coverage can have, count me in. But I sense a one-off, available only to national CBC journalists kidnapped on the eve of federal elections. Numerous kidnappings happened while Fung was missing, the vast majority reported in the usual way by the world’s media.
I can’t imagine how Lindhout’s parents must feel right now, having experienced a dramatically different news curve when their own daughter was kidnapped. Revelations that the media cared enough to remain silent about Fung must have left them concluding that Lindhout’s safety simply didn’t matter as much.

From Nov. 14: Thanks to readers for passing along a few Web sites where people can find candidate information heading into Saturday’s municipal elections.
For West Shore residents, the West Shore Chamber of Commerce features candidate profiles at http://westshore.bc.ca/elections/. The Saanich Civic League has put together a very comprehensive site for Saanich residents at http://www.saanichcivicleague.ca/. Then there’s www.victoriavotes.ca, and blogger Bernard von Schulmann’s http://victoriavision.blogspot.com/.
See you at the polls.