I was recently up visiting the town I was raised in as a small boy. A lot of synthesis of ideas about one's life and one's world seems to happen when you go back to these places. One big realization came to me upon assessing the town newspaper, and the corresponding zeitgeist of the community. People in the town are definitely not happy people. They're rednecks in the worst sense of the word. I can see the writers of the newspaper try to be very conscientious in how they approach things... yet and still, they are failing their community. The intellectuals who write the articles, or select them from the national wire, don't see the negative impact that they're having on the zeitgeist of the community.

I think it's one of the bigger problems in our society that intellectuals assume that everybody has the maturity level to think critically about things that they read. In reality, most of society is comprised of simple ordinary people. These are people who take the world at face value, and are likely to accept what writers say at face value as well.

Consider the difference in tone between this Associated Press article:

BILLINGS - Billings police say a fire that gutted an apartment hours after a domestic disturbance call may have been deliberately set.

The fire was reported shortly after 1:30 a.m. Sunday. It caused an estimated $150,000 worth of damage, but no one was injured.

Sgt. Jason Gartner says police had been called to the apartment shortly before 10 p.m. Saturday for a domestic disturbance. A 21-year-old woman reported her boyfriend had choked her, put his hands over her mouth and held her to the ground.

Gartner says when the woman tried to call police, the boyfriend left with the phone. The woman was in a neighboring apartment when the fire started.

Nathan Searsdodd was arrested Sunday morning on suspicion of partner or family member assault.

And this article which I just found today on one of the two main news websites in New Zealand (http://www.stuff.co.nz).

The body of a New Zealand tourist, reportedly brutally murdered, has been found on a surf beach in Bali.

A Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesman said Jordan Lucas had died in Bali and his family was being provided with consular assistance.

Mr Lucas' body was found at Uluwatu Beach, a popular surf beach in South Bali.

Indonesian media are reporting that police believe he was murdered.

Police said the man, found semi-naked with his head crushed, was the victim of a murder, The Jakarta Globe reported.

"He was a lovely kid, a lovely boy who just loved Bali. He was here for four months just surfing. I've known him for a long time and that's all he loved - surfing," a relative in Bali told the New Zealand Herald.

"It's just a terrible thing. His parents are understandably just terribly distraught - they've only just found out."

The Ministry said the family had requested privacy and would not release any further details.

In both cases, the details about what occurred are in short supply - and the writers have to be very brief because of that. The New Zealand article however, is much more palatable. The tone of it doesn't alarm folks. There's a note about what kind of cool guy the victim was. There's a note about how the parents feel about the matter. There's a note about how the family is getting help from the consulate.

The AP article, on the other hand, is nothing but doom and gloom. It would be very disconcerting for a person to read that, who was just an ordinary joe or jane. A simple minded person who didn't understand how newspaper authors spin stories in order to make them more edgy would be disturbed by it. The meat of the story is hearsay - a brief sequence of events at the apartment as related by those involved. There is no broader context about how long the folks lived in the neighborhood, what they did for a living in Billings, and other things like that. Furthermore, the writer heavily favors speculation over fact. The idea that the fire was deliberately set seems to be a guess on the part of the police. The way the prose is but together, makes me think that perhaps the author would rather be a film noir movie script writer. Maybe she or he missed her calling.

The impact of the prose of each article on the ordinary reader is very different - even though, in both cases, the event being described is extremely tragic.

I honestly think that the USA would be a much better country, if its journalists were conscientious enough to consider the impact of their style of writing on the minds of people who are ordinary simple folk. Canada and New Zealand, it seems to me, are much happier societies with healthier ways of discussing social issues - and I think it's because of how journalists ply their trade in those countries.

Also, recently, I visited my sister in San Francisco, and read through the Chronicle. It's a wonderful paper if you are particularly intellectually disposed. However, again, most people wouldn't see the beauty in the prose. They would see an ugly narrative about class struggle which is woven throughout the paper's stories.

I also passed through Portland, and Salt Lake City in recent weeks. Those papers (the Oregonian, and the Salt Lake City Tribune, I believe do far better at improving the attitudes and vision of people in their cities. They do it, however, in a weird way. They deconstruct the spectres that most other papers in the nation are creating as they make people scared of criminals, or terrorists or whatever else is out there. For example, the other day the only article I saw in the Tribune about the Middle East happened to be about a flood in Pakistan. So the threat there is to the local people, from a natural disaster - rather than the threat from terrorists to people in the USA. Another example of this deconstruction was a front page story about a gentleman who was a prisoner trying to get his footing in the community after doing his prison time. I applaud the gesture of such journalists. However, they still are playing defense, as writers, rather than going on the offense. They'll still needlessly playing up drama.

We need clean, proper prose in our newspapers to encourage social health, as much as we need clean air, and clean water for our physical health.

Have writers forgotten that they are there to inspire, rather than to impose?

Over the last couple of days, I have been traveling by inter-city bus across the Usa. It's a trip I make often between a coastal city where I have relatives, and my home in a mountain state. I have been musing deeply about where I would want or not want to live in the next few years. I established that, in general, I prefer the plains and mountain communities over the large coastal usa cities. Then I had to examine exactly why I had that preference. It comes down to the quality of public discussion, and the amount of success people have in their own lives, because they are seeing the world around them rightly, and are acting in a way which meets the situation well. The allusion that came to mind was that people in the small towns of the plains states are like people living a natural life daily in the woods without a map - they have learned how to see situations around them, and assess them, and apply themselves to making their life work really smoothly in the midst of these situations. On the other hand, people in Seattle, are like folks with a map and a compass - whose conception of the terrain they live in is somewhat less organic. These people may get overconfident about exactly how the map tells them they can get from place to place. And they might end up having troubles because of this.

The map I'm talking about here, is that of the discourse and commentary on current events which comes out on the pages of newspapers and on the screens of television every day.

Listening to the conversations of plains people on the bus, I saw that they talk and think in simple terms; and according to my sensibilities, they are often in error about the things that writers discuss so earnestly in places like the west coast cities, Canada, and New Zealand. However, these plains people have practical wisdom about the situations they deal with in life, which I fear they might lose if they went to one of these other countries or cities, where journalists have this incessant narrative which is a filter through which they make us see the events of the world around us.

Taking another look at New Zealand journalism tonight, I realised that Kiwis journalists work to manage the message more than those in any other country I've studied. They want to impose their vision of how society should work on the other people around them. Even though for myself, I really enjoy kiwi journalism, I think this is quite arrogant of them to think that a human society can be molded from the top down through policies of micromanagement. And now when I look at New Zealanders in the background of news broadcasts, I see a browbeaten people, who feel that they have to knuckle under to this imposition which the thinkers and writers in their country make on them. I think that deep thinking writers should seek to facilitate people - to see the passions which others have, and try to harness them for the good of the overall society. They should nurture the visions and aspirations OF THE PEOPLE around them, instead of trying to impose their own visions unilaterally on a society.

And so I tend to like a society where people address life on its own terms, rather than buying into a narrative which writers try to sell to them. I see that people in plains towns seem to have more success in their personal lives than folks in cities like Seattle or Portland, because of this. For example, on the plains, people seem to happily adapt their lifestyle to whatever services different employers are seeking to purchase that year. On the other hand, in the west coast cities, writers lay certain very strong value judgements on the value of some types of jobs over others. Writers particularly are of a creative group of folks who feel personally maligned when they aren't able to utilise their skills, or develop their aptitudes - when they're stuck in the grind of a 40 hour a week job that doesn't give them these opportunities. What they forget is that they themselves are a minority of people in any society, and that most people honestly would enjoy the economic well being they experience by being adaptable, and working whatever job happens to be available that day.

Furthermore, the children I see in plains towns seem much much happier than children in the big city. In the big city, there are certain errors in judgement that the thinkers and writers of that city make in how they design the frame of reference for their articles, and quite frankly - one of those errors is the "stranger-danger" narrative. Kids who grow up learning to mistrust all their neighbors until each one proves herself or himself will not be kindhearted neighbors; and quite frankly, the dramatised way in which journalists tend to report things leaves parents with a very unrealistic view of what is and isn't a danger to their children. And children are the future of any community our country. Those children will be adults someday with the same attitudes and perspectives they learned from their early years.

In short, I think writers would do well to be a bit more humble. They should share their ideas eagerly. They should find a way to make money with their prose and by putting their ideas into motion. But they should not be so haughty as to try to dictate the course of the society around them. The people around them are those whose passions and visions and agendas will form the fabric of society. And that is as it should be.

I like the trend we see on the internet - where at link sharing sites such as reddit.com, and digg.com - people can gather information from a variety of sources. No editor controls what people read on a link sharing site. Instead, the passions of the internet community bring certain topics up in the queue. I believe that's a better way for people to get their news about the events happening in the world.