news media – Pam Grout

Today I am brave. Today I am generous

August 19, 2019 52 Comments

“Turn your light on for those with no vision.”—Pharrell Williams

My last blog post about the “news being irrelevant” provoked a couple questions that I’d like to address. As always, I appreciate all your thoughtful comments.

Many years ago, I went to a bullfight in a foreign country that shall not be named (It was not Spain.) I left early because well, it didn’t seem fair. Before the matador even strode out in the ring with his red cape, the poor bull had been stabbed in the neck and endured six barbed sticks thrust into his shoulders.

I’m just like that bull when I consume too much news. I’m at a complete disadvantage because the “news,” which I often call “the olds,” plays on my emotions. It uses fear to grab attention. It’s often misleading, manipulative and shows a very tiny picture of what’s really happening in the world. I don’t need all that cortisol and other toxic chemicals flowing through my brain.

It’s not that I don’t want to know what’s going on. I just don’t think the news is the best delivery system for finding out.

More than anything, I long to spend my life being brave and generous. My intention is to bring out the light in myself and others. When I practice being grateful even for things like blue skies and singing birds, I’m better able to enact my intentions. It’s much easier being generous when I feel good about myself and about the world.

I feel quite confident in my ability to be an informed voter. I’m extremely aware of certain “realities” that are happening. But because I view them as temporary (there are always a gazillion other possibilities), I do what I can to shine my light.

For example, I donate money to an organization that works with immigrants. I display a yard sign in 3 languages that says, “Whoever you are, wherever you come from, I’m glad you’re my neighbor” and, every week, I take a couple young Mexican girls to get ice cream or to the movies or to paint pottery.

My job, as I see it, is to relentlessly present other data points. Even in my work as a reporter for People magazine, where, yes, I report on tornadoes and kidnappings and whole towns being washed away by floods, I witness the most incredible displays of generosity, the very finest of the human spirit.

No one protested or railed against dial telephones. Yet, for the most part, they disappeared.

Somebody created a better reality. That’s my commitment. What’s yours?

Pam Grout is the author of 19 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest book, Art & Soul,Reloaded: A Year-Long Apprenticeship to Summon the Muses and Ignite Your Daring, Audacious, Creative Side.

Why the news is irrelevant

August 9, 2019 65 Comments

“We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press.”—Rolf Dobelli

What I see in the news media is a tiny speck of a reality far removed from true Reality.

It’s so limited in dimension and scope of understanding that paying close attention is like unknowingly having one of those “please kick me” signs pinned to my back.

The news media feeds me small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern my life and don’t require thinking.

Out of thousands of news stories and tweets I’ve read, not one–because I consumed it–helped me make a better decision about a serious matter affecting my life.

“News” is just one corporation’s opinion. It’s mostly clickbait, completely irrelevant to my well-being. Truly creative minds–whether composers, mathematicians, scientists, authors or musicians–could care less what’s trending on twitter.

I’ve concluded that the important stuff I need to know is happening right outside my window, right here in my neighborhood, right in my own heart.

What really matters is the indestructible joy and pulse of life being broadcast from every tree, every star, every bird.

My mission now is to pay more attention to the collective rhythm and wisdom emanating from the larger whole, what I often call the Divine Buzz.

It might sound big and cosmic, but it’s really the most natural thing in the world. And it’s a gazillion times more resourceful and richer in content than anything I could ever hear on CNN.

So it’s Friday, my friends, and you know what that means. It’s time to go out and grab the weekend by the balls. Make it the best one yet.

Why it’s time for an intervention from the relentless 24/7 media

May 16, 2016 81 Comments

“Violence is interesting which makes it a great obstacle to world peace and more thoughtful television programming.” –P.J. O’Rourke

Crisis, conflict and violence are the prevailing themes of our 24/7 media. If some stranger talked to us the way newscasters do, we’d tell them to go jump in a lake. Likewise, if our boyfriends made us feel the way headlines often do, our friends would line up for an intervention. ‘Toss the jerk out on his head,’ they’d say.”

Living in fear sells products, creates economies, elects politicians and keeps the flying monkeys on the job. But it’s not the truth about the world.

The reality is that the world is safer today than at anytime in history. The murder rate has plummeted in the last ten years. School shootings are no more prevalent than they were in “Leave it to Beaver” days. In fact, collaboration, goodness and, yes, love are the norm.

It’s just that the dominant paradigm, the one we’ve blindly bought into is “life sucks.” Any thought to the contrary is sidelined immediately by the 27-inch box in the corner of most of our living rooms (and kitchen and bedrooms). In fact, if you pay attention to the box–and most of us use it to form our view of reality–you have little choice but to conclude that murder, rape, war, and genocide is the human condition.

But if you look at it scientifically, the math just doesn’t work out. For every Koran-burning Terry Jones, there are 335,000 ministers who aren’t burning the Koran, who are espousing peace and love and tolerance. For every Scott Peterson, there’s 58.9 million husbands who didn’t murder their wives.

Every day, we’re spoon-fed “news” about missing children, identity theft, the mild-mannered neighbor who walks into work with an AK-47 and a bomb pack and blows up his boss and 27 co-workers.

Why do we think this is news?

On the same day (February 18, 2008), two-year-old Karissa Jones was abducted from her home in Louisville, Kentucky (by her father, as it turns out), there were 53,298 two-year-olds in Kentucky who didn’t get abducted, who were safe and sound at home, happily sipping apple juice from their Winnie-the-Pooh high chairs. Nearly a million children of all ages in Kentucky also didn’t get abducted that same day.

Why is Karissa the “news?”

News, by definition, is new information that teaches people about the world. Picking out what happened to two-one thousandth of one percent of the state’s two-year-olds is not an accurate picture of the world. If you ask me, what happened to the other 53,298 two-year-olds is a bigger story. Or at least it’s more realistic news.

What you see on the newscasts at night, what you read in the morning newspaper is not a realistic perception of our world. It’s an anomaly, an out-of-character thing that happened at one moment in time. News junkies pride themselves on believing they’re well-informed. Because they know what Ann Curry said about the latest layoffs at Boeing and what Morley Safer reported on the earthquake in New Zealand, they smugly believe they’re up on current events.

But do they know about the African-American postman in Germantown, Tennessee who jumped into a lake to save a couple whose brakes went out of their car when they were coming home from a hospital dialysis treatment? Do they know about the Marysville, Kansas attorney who flew, on his own dime, to Israel to donate a kidney to a 10-year-old he’d never met?

Thinking you’re informed because you watch the news is like thinking you understand a zoo when you’ve only seen the “Z” on the entryway sign. It’s not a complete picture, guys. It’s not even a good picture. I’m not going to argue that you can’t find the letter “Z” at any zoo. But if you try to convince me you’re a zoo expert or even that you have a faint understanding of what a zoo is all about because you’ve seen a “Z,” well, I’m sorry, I have no choice but to argue.

Attention-grabbing headlines and newscasts are nothing more than a sales tool, no more “factual” than “The Simpsons.” Isolated incidences get turned into frightening trends and our own thoughts have become conditioned to leap to the worst.

The mission of this blog is to free readers from the straitjacket of the relentless news media. Instead of asking “What’s wrong?,” a question we hear over and over again, I’d like to pose a simple question with the power to change the world: “What’s right?”

Pam Grout is the author of 18 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the about to be released, Thank and Grow Rich: a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy

Lizard or lover? What’s your response to Paris?

November 16, 2015 86 Comments

“Absolutely everything is available to us — sorrow and joy, grievance and forgiveness, horror and transcendence — it’s all on the menu. It’s up to us where we put our attention.”—Josh Radnor

I was lucky. When news of the Paris attacks struck the airwaves, I was standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, gazing out at billions of years of evolution, making it much easier to put things into perspective.

Like everybody else, I have a limbic cortex (AKA the lizard brain) that’s in charge of fight, flight, fear and freezing up.

But I also know, after years of covering such events as a news reporter, that the minute some tragedy happens, people rush forward to help, to heal, to bring forth the higher part of ourselves that loves, only loves.

In Paris, for example, an anonymous musician drug a piano by bicycle to the Bataclan and played John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The taxi drivers offered rides for free. The hash tag #PorteOuverte (it means open door) was broadcast across social media for anyone needing shelter.

And all of us have a choice. Do we live from our lizard brain that’s urging us to fear, to retract, to cower in isolation? Or do we become the lovers, the higher selves that we all know is possible.

Part of the reason I no longer work as a news reporter is because the news (which spotlights mostly beastly anomalies) reports on an antiquated way of life that’s grasping for its last breath. I choose now to report on love and on possibility and the new world that is surging forward.

I know it’s tempting to sit mute in front of the television set or the twitter feed that recounts the gruesome and grotesque. But that only feeds the lizard. The lover in you is just as strong, just as valid. And it wants to act. So your choice.

I’d love to hear in the comments section below the act of love, bravery and kindness you will perpetrate today.

Pam Grout is the author of 17 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and its equally-scintillating sequel, E-Cubed, 9 More Experiments that Prove Mirth, Magic and Merriment is your Full-time Gig.

“So let’s get going so we can have a whopping party.”—Diana Nyad

September 5, 2013 3 Comments

“Is there an edge? Does it go into infinity in time and space? There’s nothing like swimming in the ocean for 50 hours that gets you to thinking about things like this.”—Diana Nyad

Even though I’m a journalist and it would probably be wise to keep this to myself, I don’t put a lot of stock in the news.

To my way of thinking, the news is short-sighted, mostly negative and doesn’t begin to show an accurate picture of the way the world really is. In fact, most of what I see on the all-important news seems pretty irrelevant to my life.

However, there was a news item this week that is as close to what I consider Truth as it comes.

I know you’ve heard about it. Diana Nyad, at age 64, after four other failed attempts, swam 110 miles in 52 hours and 54 minutes, the first swimmer to go the distance from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage.

So in honor of this amazing woman who went for her big dream, I decided to post her very inspiring Ted Talk.

This is for anyone out there who thinks they’re too old or it’s too late or they’ve already tried way too many times.

This, my friends, is the news!!

Pam Grout is the author of 16 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality.