As much as I appreciate an organization such as Rappler and what it is attempting to achieve, its focus on breaking stories down according to ‘mood meters’ is kind of misguided. It actually also acts as another pointed commentary on public discourse in the Philippines.

This ‘crowd-sourcing’ of emotional responses does little to further discussion, it has the unfortunate by-product of reducing discourse to almost unimportant binary considerations. Is everyone happy? Is everyone saaaad? How many are happy? How many are saaaaad? How are we feeling today?

Look, how people feel should be far less important than what they think about an issue, or a story. Yet it is the emotions that our media loves to exploit, it is their baser feelings on which they thrive. Feelings drive clicks, reblogs, comments, views, and subscriptions. Tony Judt, in his book Ill Fares the Land, commented on this global degeneration of public discourse: “Demagogues tell the crowd what to think; when their phrases are echoed back to them, they boldly announce that they are merely relaying popular sentiment…professional politicians now claim to listen to vox populi in the form of instant phone-in votes and popularity polls on everything from immigration policy to pedophilia. Twittering back to their audiences its own fears and prejudices, they are relieved of the burden of leadership or initiative.”  

The fact that we can draw a comparison between journalists and crowd-leveraging politicians is not necessarily a good thing (ok, it’s never a good thing). Journalism is as much a socially and culturally important calling as government service. It is an awesome responsibility, this vast trust that is imbued in the words of a journalist, that should not be abused. Nor reduced for purposes of segregation and emotion-mongering.

Again, I like Rappler. I like what they are doing. I like the fact that they are owned by journalists who are attempting to hold themselves to the highest standards of journalistic ethics and integrity. I am just uncomfortable with this focus on the feelings of people. Primarily because the corollary is the attempt to elicit emotional responses as opposed to focusing on the stories themselves. Like Tony Judt, I worry that media is becoming more focused on reflecting the feelings and attitudes of the people as opposed to being leaders in crafting and challenging us to look at the issues of the day in new ways.