Sky Views: Whatever your world view, please don't look away

Monday 9 July 2018 04:21, UK

Why you can trust Paste BN

Hannah Thomas-Peter, US Correspondent

When I tell people what I do, I keep getting the same response.

"Oh I just can't watch the news anymore."

"I have to turn it off."

"So many awful things going on."

"Too depressing. Too confusing."

"I've given up trying to work out who's telling the truth."

"I don't want to think about that stuff anymore."

I know the feeling. I work in news, and sometimes I feel compelled to turn off the TV and shut down Twitter too.

Just to make it stop. Just for a few hours.

For lots of the people I know, it was the casual cruelty of separating children from families that made them look away in disgust and despair.

For as many others, it's been the collapse of civility in public life.

Or the vile, incendiary language of some on the left.

"F*** Trump!" said Robert De Niro, proudly, to rapturous applause.

Maybe for you it's the incessant bickering about Brexit.

Or another famous person you once admired revealed as a sexual predator.

Perhaps it's the impending trade wars.

Nuclear Armageddon.

Death by plastic.

The migrant crisis.

Human beings abandoned in the desert or dying at sea.

Perhaps you're fed up with the press itself for covering this stuff.

Perhaps you don't trust us and our rotating news tickers of misery anymore, screaming out from whatever screen you're holding.

At this moment, now more than ever, it somehow feels better not to read, watch and listen, just for the sake of self-protection.

But please don't look away.

I believe we have a moral obligation to watch, absorb and assess what is happening in our world right now.

More than anything, it is a responsibility to one another, strengthening our herd immunity to exploitation, fearmongering, lies and spin.

Look away, and we become less informed.

Look away, and we become passive lumps, squeezed by the forces shaping a society we will live in for decades to come.

Look away, and the blinds on the windows of the powerful and influential inch down, until one day no one can see in at all.

That's when we'll find out how bad it might really get.

The Washington Post's tagline is: "Democracy dies in darkness."

In my mind that doesn't just apply to the responsibilities of a free press, but to all of us.

So.

Wherever you are on the political spectrum, whatever your world view, here's a plea:

Find information sources you trust.

Watch, listen and read.

Judge what you see.

Disagree. Debate. Act. Vote.

Just don't look away.