We need a Howard Beale… except in this day and age I’m pretty sure they would be silently cut off by the station manager from the production booth and such a speech never heard by the public but here for anyone who hasn’t heard it is the speech by the character Howard Beale (a newscaster) from the 1975 movie “Network”….

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“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’

Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. (shouting) You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’

I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows. Open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!…You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first, get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!’

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When was the last time you saw someone interviewed on TV who didn’t have a book to sell? At this point they could stop mentioning the books at all and I’d assume they were advertising them in the lower third or on the website and I hadn’t noticed it or perhaps that they have just started to expect viewers will search for the person online and find their book like some kind of Pavlovian response.

The only way I see people regaining trust in established media organisations is if they were “watching them burn”. The distrust is so built in now that to be trustworthy they have to be actively engaged in blatant self sabotage before we can overcome our collective cynicism. For us to trust them they must believe the “truth” they wish to tell us so much they are willing to self-immolate in-front of their audience otherwise how can we possibly tell it isn’t yet another marketing campaign for someone pulling the strings we haven’t seen yet.