A lament for the time when journalism sought the truth
The discussions on the issues of standard Albanian at that time were like football duels with passionate fans and I was invited to do so. Some form of Get in the ring!
A woman’s voice with a playful accent from Tirana was telling me that He, one of the most prominent television moderators in Albania, was inviting me to a discussion on standard Albanian, where I would talk with some of my colleagues from Albania.
I happened to be in Tirana at a conference and, why not, I accepted.
This would have been more than fifteen years ago and I was still proud of journalism in Kosovo. Not so with the one in Albania. Therefore, I didn’t even remember watching any of the debates of this moderator who had/has nam more than any pop star.
The studio was beautiful and the discussion expected. Soon, the conversation would turn into a division into two camps: prescriptivist on one side and descriptivist (of which I was a part) on the other, and yet the argumentation among educated people was not being done with raising one’s voice, interfering, labeling and frowning, but with patience and respect. What was being discussed was a battle of diametrically opposed ideas between dogma and scholarship, and I found it very valuable and profound as a result. If it were transcribed, it would be possible to produce a handbook of thoughts in Albanianology.
I had to correct the moderator a couple of times, rudely, for issues of linguistics. Normal thing. He is not a linguist.
I returned to Pristina and was waiting for the show. Some of my acquaintances had a twinkle in their eyes: Te Ai ki me dale a? Another debate came on that day and it was the first time I watched the first 15 minutes of the moderator’s show. It was one of those performances, where the participants, seemingly civilians, with gold collars and buttons on white shirts, shouted, threw themselves into words, mocked, insulted, interrupted each other. I changed the channel soon. A porn of uneducated and provincialism.
The show didn’t come out even in the following days and weeks and once, one of my colleagues from Tirana called me about something else and when I asked her about the show she said: “Ah, that show will never be broadcast… We were very cultured… we didn’t fight”.
Thank goodness there are no such televisions in Kosovo, I thought about that. Long live Kosovo journalism, the best in the Balkans!
From that wish, in the meantime, there is not even Rr.
What used to be our pride, has turned into the fashion that was coming from the shows, like the one that didn’t give civilized conversation. Making such shows is easy and people often choose the easy over the right. That fashion also came to Kosovo and became everyday.
As much as I try not to watch any such debates on television, this time it was election day and curiosity drives you to see if any real analysis will be said. In the end, it ends up playing tetris with the telepilot, as the channels are switched one after the other, with the same result: loud ignorance, as one of the fundamental features of the age in which we live.
Ignorance these days ranged from the basic ignorance of mathematics, to the inability to understand and interpret a simple text, which are the two main points, where the male and female students of Kosovo fail the Pisa Test. (Over eighty percent underperforming in reading and math in 2022). Will this television behavior be a consequence of lack of education? Or do the tests reflect what is taught on television?
At first glance, it seems to be normal behavior in a society of the spectacle, and Guy Dubort says that the spectacle has no essence, it is done only for itself: for the spectacle itself.
This spectacle produces the noise. When this noise comes with vested interest and deliberate obfuscation, then it enters the scientific definition of bullshitting.
Bullshitting is communication that ignores the truth and the truth-seeking process (in the terms of authors such as Harry Frankfurt).
When that shepherd cries out: it is the wolf, it is the wolf, he knows what the truth is and yet tells a lie. This makes the shepherd a liar. However, when someone shouts: it’s a wolf, it’s a wolf, without knowing if it’s someone or not, without knowing if it’s a wolf or what a wolf is, then he/she is doing bullshitting.
In Albanian, there are several suitable candidates to replace the term Bullshit in this sense (that the prescriptivists will react, looking for more pronounced words): pallavra, broçkulla, gepura, muhalife and so on, with small nuances of meaning among themselves, but none is more suitable than the expression “me hongër mt”.
However, there is also a difference between “how long” someone eats. The difference is that when someone is “eating” loudly, in an expert tone, with the self-belief that many words and noises can replace knowledge, whining is in the definition of bullshitting.
The format calls for it. It may not be the fault of the individuals but of the model. A show that values fights and rants, decibels and rifts over fact, temperature over light, doesn’t produce debate. It produces the empty spectacle and the illusion of public opinion. We look at it. Some follow his example. Some don’t. However, we all get used to it.
I myself got into these eddies once. When I was confronted not with arguments, but with bullshit, on another show, I reacted out of my nature.
But here we are now. From that unpublished debate of more than 15 years ago until today, there has been a fundamental change in the media of Kosovo. To bad.
True journalism does not begin with the question: Who won the debate? It begins with the question: What is true? There are two questions at two different extremes, the answers to which define a society. The societies where the second question dominates are the societies in which I would like to live.
When they didn’t release the show, in which we didn’t fight over standard Albanian, they weren’t even interested in the question: who won the debate?
In such a society, the truth remains not only hidden, but also irrelevant.
At the time, when I was still saying: Long live Kosovo journalism! – a journalist whom I had trained at the beginning of her career and who had now received an important award for excellence in journalism, came to thank me.
– Thank you for teaching me to write, he told me.
– No, I told him. You didn’t win the prize for writing techniques. You earned it because you searched patiently and selflessly to find the truths you published. You have earned the reward for being honest in your work and to yourself. No one can teach that… As for writing: you haven’t learned to write yet.
In other words: Meal, oh meal!
