State of press

I was talking to my Nepali brother today, and we were discussing the Nepali Press, and the Rest of the Press. My re-reading of a fan letter received sparked this conversation; as a reader of this paper had taken the time to email me, and he actually said something interesting before I could hit the delete key, thinking it was another junk mail from an Indian Jobs website.



This reader wrote “[my articles in the] Op-Ed portal, unlike most of the articles there, seem light, mirthful, and more importantly, comprehensible.” Emphasis added by me.



To comprehend - to be clear. So I asked my brother: “Do you find Nepali papers comprehensible, or in other words, do you understand what you read there?”



He laughed out loud - with a heck-no-are-you-kidding kinda look. “I can’t even get past the first paragraphs,” he says.



So this time around I want to focus on comprehensibility. I know, even the word has problems, as I just turned a perfectly good verb form (to comprehend) into a boring noun, and is what we in the biz call creating a nominalization. That’s just one way we turn our power into dribble. But I digress...



I understand this problem within the Nepali press. I teach English to those that write news. I read their rough drafts. I understand the philosophy around the issue of clarity, even if I don’t fully understand all the cultural influences...there is no need; it’s the same world-over in small country presses trying to print in English. The truth is usually buried in less-than-clear writing.



Writing clearly is not normally paramount in small country newsrooms. Nor is clarity important in nearby boardrooms. Heck, until the recent globalization, it was not even mandatory in the ozone of America...from the gilded towers of 1950’s Wall Street to the ivory towers of America’s great universities...writing clearly was never a practice commonly found.




But there have been two arenas where clear writing was always mandatory and in demand: In the Press and in Sales. Large country press organizations (since inception) have demanded simple English from their teams of editors and writers. And successful American and British press outfits have been the de facto model followed by the rest of the world ever since. Then of course there are those that sell cereal and soap, who do so ever so clearly and prolifically.



Until the rise of internet news and the blogosphere, most investigative reporting and opinion bits were written in a style that the “Average Joe” could understand, and great pains were made to make that so. These days, with the mix of unedited accounts of current events and with journalists quoting anonymous bloggers, official news and opinion have lost their mark of quality and integrity, but still, they do struggle to achieve some resemblance of clarity. Anyone born before 1980 has read through this evolution.



The interesting question to ask from this is “Why?” What purpose does clear writing have in the world at large? Let me purport (in a very pompous way) that clarity in writing sells products. Clarity sells ideas. Clarity can make you rich.



Now of course that’s the pessimistic viewpoint. If I were feeling more like a political campaign manager, I would sell you another view, one where clarity educates, clarity cuts through the bullshit, clarity will set you free. Hope and change brother, hope and change.



Individuals have reasons to obfuscate, as do large organizations - they with even more reason to avoid clarity. Press owned by state bullies will take clear news and make it incomprehensible, and use the Op-Ed sections to twist the truth into an unimaginably fantastic pack of lies - after all, why stop at just being plain Jane incompressible when you can be a tool of the devil instead?



Then there are large organizations of lawyers (governments), who just compound the problems of unclear writing to a gargantuan state of confusion. And it’s this very confusion that springs forth the law of the land. Literally. The laws we all abide by (or not) are written from utter chaos when it comes to clarity. Think about it.



So today I am discussing just this topic (clarity at large in the world) with one of my crazy kuire expat friends. I suspect we are friends because we are both crazy kuires, and we are part of a small brotherhood here in town; a loose-knit organization that doesn’t have monthly meetings or pay dues or even see each other semi-annually, if at all. Interesting enough, we all have Nepali wives and consequently we view the world much differently than anyone without. Those married to a smart Nepali girl know what I mean.



So my pal and I both agreed that perhaps the blogosphere mixed with the declining state of large media newsrooms (CNN, BBC, TMZ, etc.) is just helping those that want to hide the truth from the masses. And you know what I’m talking about. The truth about the War, the truth about the Spill, the truth about the Economy...it’s all getting more and more jumbled up, and there is a good reason:



“You want the truth, you can’t handle the truth!”



- Colonel Jessep, from the movie A Few Good Men.



I love that movie ending. It shows that the overall structure can breakdown, and that the individuals that are hiding the truth from us all can be broken, made to confess, and to finally come clean. There can be an end to the Israel-Palestine war, there can be an end to the War in Afghanistan, there can be a Nepali Constitution written, and there can be an end to the poverty and suffering of untold and unfathomable amounts of people living on the planet today. If only there were the truth, which of course we can handle, and perhaps a bit of clear writing, along with a short list of other things...



Pipe dream? You tell me how you are handling the truth these days...



(Writer is quirky kinda expat happily living in the Kathmandu valley with Nepali family, friends, and a very large dog – who are all on Facebook, even the 300+ friend dog.)

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