May 07, 2025 05:23 EDT
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| Dear FO° Reader Even as we write this piece, India has struck nine sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered (occupied if you take the Indian point of view) Kashmir. India Today tells us that the Indian government has struck nine terror camps. Pakistan’s Dawn reports that Pakistani officials claim that Indians struck only six sites and Pakistanis downed five Indian jets. This is not the first time both countries have clashed and differed in their reporting of the clash. It will certainly not be the last time. We are not writing this piece about Kashmir or India-Pakistan conflicts. If you want to dive deeper into the history of the conflict, you can go to our timeline. Our focus today is on the crisis of journalism: international, national, regional and local.  A fragmented media landscape Journalism inevitably tends to reflect the values of the three distinct groups of people: those who own, run and consume the news. If Jeff Bezos owns a publication, its journalists are very unlikely to make the compelling case for Teddy Roosevelt-style trust-busting of big internet giants. If editors from Ivy Leagues run a publication, they do not feel uneasy about exposing the exceedingly large endowments of their alma maters. Furthermore, both owners and editors have to pander to their readers, especially during polarized times. The result is predictable reporting and editorializing.  Even in far more genteel times, this was the case. 40 years ago the legendary television series Yes Prime Minister captured this perfectly, with its inimitable British humor, when its fictional prime minister neatly summed up the stereotypical profiles of readers of each of Britain’s most prominent newspapers. Those who own, run and think they ought to run the country definitely do read different newspapers.  As we can see from news headlines, we are living in times when strife is on the rise. India and Israel are not the only places at loggerheads. Syria is in turmoil, Israel has announced plans to capture Gaza, and the Russia-Ukraine War continues, despite Donald Trump’s promise to have put it to bed by noon January 21. During these times of war, the media will inevitably offer us warring narratives. Furthermore, political polarization and social media have combined in such a way that people consume and become exclusively locked into the narratives they like as the news becomes tailor-made for hyper-individual consumption. This means that no two people might even see the same news. On a day like today, marked by so much conflict, many people were completely absorbed in one of the greatest Champions League semi finals of all time. Inter Milan beat Barcelona 4-3 in a pulsating match. They remained blissfully unaware of the news delivered on their mobile phones about wars in faraway places. One of us loves football and will definitely watch the highlights of the match. The other loves basketball and is tuned into the high drama of the second round of the NBA playoffs. Yet these suspenseful matches cannot and should not drown out what is going on in the world, especially between two nuclear-armed neighbors. So, what is the antidote The fact that different people read different newspapers or consume different news media is partly a feature of human nature. As we have said repeatedly, we are all prisoners of our backgrounds, personalities and philosophies. One of us grew up in California during the Vietnam War and maintains an abiding distrust of the military-industrial complex. Another of us grew up seeing India suffer under Soviet-inspired socialism and has an abiding distrust of the Indian colonial bureaucracy. Yet, as the two of us hopefully demonstrate, we can strive to be more than the products of our environments. Reading, traveling and interacting with people from different cultures help. Both of us left our native lands to study at Oxford. Both of us have lived, travelled and worked in many countries. Both of us challenge each other. Indeed, the two of us began working together after a debate on religion that you can read below.  Religion Is Just Morality Tales for Grown-Ups
 A New Religion to Bring You to Your Knees: Capitalism, if You Please…
We believe that we live at a time when owners control far too much of what is published in the bigger news media organizations. We also think that the social media model is democratic in terms of access but lacks the guardrails to enable reasoned discourse. The owners of social media companies are monetizing our attention. Their goal is to make their platforms addictive and we know full well that addictive substances like cocaine or sugar rarely tend to be healthy. Our antidote to the dominant model is a bottom-up model. Our content is crowdsourced from around the world. We are actively seeking to extend our activity to other languages, which means other cultures. We publish voices from every region of the globe. We only ask them to follow our editorial guidelines, which at their essence aim for a fact-based, well-reasoned argument. We follow the nonprofit model, so our funding is crowdsourced from readers like you. We promise you that you will read some pieces you disagree with but we will always be open to publishing a response, your response. In a nutshell, we are striving to provide an antidote to the polarization of our times. We have broken free from both private ownership of the news media and the walled garden approach of many reputed news organizations. We do not have all answers and want to hear from you as to how to create a new form of news media organization. We have made some progress but need to go a long way and we cannot do so without you. So, the two of us appeal to you to write to us with your ideas. More than ever, we need to hear from you. From near Boston and the Cognac region of France, Atul Singh Founder, CEO & Editor-in-Chief Peter Isackson Chief Strategy Officer |
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