Welcome to my new/old website. As regular readers of meganlouise.org will know, I am an author and illustrator who has tended to write about a few perennial topics, including why learning more about my (and your) spirituality means so much to me, what I feel I’ve learned about the corporate news lobby working on many high-profile CNN, Washington Post, and National Geographic productions, and, even while I wait to find anyone outside the industry to listen to my take on stock market-entangled media business models, how helpful I’ve found it to take joy in treasured practices like trail running, art-making, and caring for animals regardless of whatever else is going on in my life in any given moment. Most recently, I have focused largely on exploring the role of Wall Street influence on editorial decision-making in journalism and its effects, in turn, on world affairs.
My blog’s moniker originally having spurred an exploration of the meaning of my name – Warrior Pearl Storyteller – I switched to a new URL after observing what appeared to be a problem of severe hacking. Feeling it may be a good time anyway to more deeply ponder the meaning of my children’s book imprint – Content Under Pressure – I love the idea, not of publishing contents under pressure, but considering what it means to be content despite what can sometimes feel like a lot of pressure; and so I currently maintain both sites.
As a person who tried to speak as part of the women’s movement in corporate journalism – not against any person, but with regard to the arguably problematic nature of our media sector’s prevailing business model – but to little response, I’ve continued to explore what I consider to be some of the potential benefits of journalism sector reform; and a primary purpose of this blog is to help reverse a Wall Street machine-imposed triage protocol for addressing fissures in American democracy. arguably catalyzed by our stock market’s merger with our news sector, which would target and scapegoat people in the phenomenon now well-known as “cancel culture” rather than allow for a desperately-needed and impersonal public dialogue on the advisability, if not the constitutionality, of publicly-traded journalism corporations.
Throughout human history, it seems to me, significant breakthroughs in the elevation of human rights have been followed by revelations of mankind’s genuine, spiritual nature but that, quick on the heels of each such step forward, there almost always appears to be an almost immediate temptation to reverse course that simply needs to be resisted. Just as Christ Jesus entered the world just as its first at-scale, even if nascent, democracy was beginning to take hold and immediately before the Roman Republic fell, and just as his healing teachings had begun to scale right before his church was arguably coopted by what was later termed the Roman Empire to, arguably, lay dormant for close to 1,600 years, and just as these were reintroduced to the world in the United States at almost the moment our country shed the institution of slavery only to seem to, to a degree, seem to go dormant again with the new nation’s church and state institutions’ associations with a corporate journalism sector that had, arguably, became illegitimate itself when it merged with the extraconstitutional national operating system called Wall Street, I wonder whether our next collective leap forward will occur once we as a country take steps such as exploring the possibility of severing ties with the corporate news lobby, not only to support the rights of women within news corporations but of the world the industry’s prevailing business model seems to be harming. Just as religious progress was not eradicated from the world with the fall of the Roman Republic, Egypt’s independence having been maintained and afforded a safe haven for the Christ child, nor was it eradicated with the arguable cooptation of much of the church by the Roman Empire, which had retained its’ predecessor’s name, democratic progress was not eradicated, though it was arguably greatly slowed, by America’s delay in abolishing the institution of slavery nor was it eradicated with the merger of its news and stock market sectors, although it does seem to have been slowed to a practical crawl by a country that, so hampered, is in some ways still only arguably the United States anymore in name even while what may be termed the united corporations of Wall Street rolls ahead. Even if rare, there have persisted channels through which legitimate public dialogue continues to be permitted and, as a person from Plymouth Massachusetts who disagrees strongly with what I’ve termed the corporate media lobby’s cooptation of both advances in rights for African Americans and women in general as I consider both movements to be completely compatible and complementary, I write not to oppose publications like the 1619 Project but the modes of their deployment at what had seemed to be a key opportunity in American history for our collective declaration of independence from the corporate news lobby.
Regardless of others’ view on the largeness of this viewpoint, I do feel it is worth wondering several questions regarding what has seemed to be a remarkable omission of any sort of meaningful public dialogue on corporate media business models in recent years:
- Why, as just one example, on the world’s so-called newspaper of record, New York Times’, online organizational chronology does it not so much as note the massively significant decision on the part of its leadership to list on the stock exchange in the first place?
- Why, more specifically to my own experience, when, during the women’s movement in corporate journalism I agreed to speak to CNN and they told me, as I remember, to tell them what I wanted and that they would see if they could get it for me and I tried to raise the matter of women’s civil rights within the corporation, did they ghost?
- Why, when I reached out to the National Geographic Vice President who helped me obtain work on the company’s documentaries in the first place (and whom I have no intention of naming) to let him know I had experienced severe safety concerns while working on a field shoot abroad, rather than responding, did he simply unfollow me?
- Why, after (1) noting that CNN anchor Chris Cuomo was dismissed almost immediately after I tried (perhaps very unwisely) to contact the UN itself via LinkedIn regarding my dual concerns both about women’s civil rights within CNN and the increasingly conspicuous, negative effects an arguably unaccountable corporate news sector was having on world affairs, and (2) after noting that, very shortly after I attempted to do the same again CNN president Jeff Zucker also parted ways with the company very suddenly, and (3) after, feeling there may be a connection, I then reached out to the Honestly company, now called The Free Press, about concerns about women’s rights within CNN and a contention that the propriety of the corporate news sector’s prevailing business model required a public dialogue, rather than engaging, it insisted that it accepted complete essays only, and (3) after I did submit two complete essays, even though it affirmed it did not wish to publish them, readership skyrocketed that very day anyway and has continued to be notably consistent on a practically day-in and day-out basis in the years since, and (4) after I proceeded to then attempt to speak out about my concerns to the Hoover Institution, which I now understand to be closely affiliated with the Fox News corporation about questions relating to the constitutionality of companies’ like CNN’s and Fox News’s business model, and I noted that high-profile cable news figures Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson were dismissed the next day within minutes of one another, when I then I approached the publisher of the most prestigious news outlet of which I am aware and which is not listed on any stock exchange in order to ask whether it held investments in any stock market-listed corporate news outlets, did I receive a personal response but no answer to my question?
By focusing on systems in helping tackle the question of the implications of a stock market-journalism sector merger as it seems to lay at the root of many societal ills tearing our country apart so needlessly, I feel there is hope for sector reform; and I believe it important to persist in exploring the subject, a slowdown in spiritual education seeming to have catalyzed the fusion which has given rise to the artificially intelligent machine called the united corporations of Wall Street and its campaign of doing what it is programmed to do – maximize the relative concentration of wealth and power at all costs by hacking extant weaknesses in human nature into the cooptation of virtually all of the United States’ most crucial infrastructures and sectors in a still-stoppable tidal wave that seems to me to have overtaken, first the commercial sector, and then the political, nonprofit, educational and even religious while making remarkably little, even if conspicuous, concessions to American values.
As a writer, I tend to learn through the lens of daily experience, and you are welcome to read some of my newer essays, poems, and even satirical sketches on subjects as wide-ranging as how bird watching lends insight to trends in modern politics, what developing a tropical keto-vegan and rose-essenced funnel cake (you basically just tangzhong your vital wheat gluten with rosewater and coconut milk) taught me about intuition, or what a dystopian future may look like in which China gets so fed up waiting to learn America’s secret for cultivating creativity and innovation (it is a form of democracy built on deep spiritual insight) its leadership points a warhead armed with all the world’s supply of Coco Mademoiselle directly at us. I’m glad not to have pursued an obvious passion for perfumery professionally, although I still try to savor and accentuate the beauty I encounter in the world as effectively as possible. Occasionally, I find it necessary to employ words considered obsolete for precision’s sake; and you may encounter a “whilst” here or there; but I’ve determined that I need it, and I’m not giving it back.
All of that – and I know it is a whole lot – said, I’m continuing to write about subjects that have always interested me and that I hope will still inspire you.
When I was very little, something I appreciate about my Dad is that, even though he had a full-time white collar career in Boston, because he had to travel such a long distance in order to get there each day, he took on a second job as a bus driver, giving others a lift along his way. May as well, he figured.
As a corporate whistleblower, I do not seem to have much choice but to attempt to learn how it is that the reform of America’s journalism sector has seemed to prove so difficult; and, while I do not know how many other people in the world consider the topic interesting, it has felt helpful to write about it and, however rarely now, even share a post when it feels as though an idea may be helpful to others.
Not too many people outside of the corporate news lobby have seemed to pay attention. But, I still figure, I may as well.
