Help get Big News to stop promoting animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice and to start teaching the truth about animals, including human beings.
What
RPA’s Elephant in the Newsroom campaign urges the news industry to stop reinforcing false and harmful beliefs about human nature and other animals; to stop framing nonhuman animals as innately inferior to human beings, as less worthy of consideration and fulfillment than human beings, and as non-persons; to tell the truth about animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice, their devastating harm to human beings, and the moral injury they inflict on all of us; and to supplant their established misleading and untruthful word usage promoting speciesism, humanist- extremism, and animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice with truthful language enabling human beings to grasp reality so they can decide in democratic fashion what policy ought to be.
Why
It is impossible to begin to reduce animal abuse as long as news – with its power to determine what people think about, how they perceive others and understand their experience, and what they ignore and consider unworthy of their attention – promotes animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice and suppresses knowledge that, if grasped by the public, would impel people worldwide to organize and act against the animal-abuse status quo.
A powerful institution, news usually comports with other institutions – government, industry, schools, universities, religions, civic groups, and others – in establishing, mental frames in the human mind and reinforcing those already established. News only rarely corrects entrenched beliefs that turn out to be false. News is not a truth-telling endeavor but one that mediates between its various audiences and the special interests vying for public attention, patronage, sympathy, trust, and other benefits.
Much human perception and understanding are fictitious, implemented by tyrant classes over thousands of years using propaganda, pseudoscience, and religion to glorify the status quo, maintain an unjust order, prevent rebellion, and squelch the struggle for justice. The availability of science, social science, research, investigations, and good intentions of reporters, analysts, and commentators has not liberated the human mind from long-established delusions. Newspersons are raised with those delusions, indoctrinated into them like everyone else. Becoming a reporter doesn’t free anyone from false and harmful beliefs they share with the rest of their fellow human beings. Fact-checking only applies at the surface of the matter at hand, not to background beliefs or ideologies, the conscious and subconscious mental frames that order our perception and understanding.
When it comes to animals, civilization’s false and harmful background beliefs incorporated into news without serious challenge include the following: There are higher and lower, superior and inferior beings. Human beings are not animals, or they differ fundamentally from other animals. Human beings inherently matter and other animals do not. Abuse of nonhuman animals and nonhuman animals’ suffering do not matter the way abuse of human beings and human suffering do. Human beings are entitled to other animals and their natural homes and ecosystems for any human purpose or amusement; are entitled to injure, kill, or displace any nonhuman animal deemed by human beings a danger, problem, or obstacle. And informed challenges to such beliefs and the policies, cultures, and practices they generate and perpetuate are not worthy of public discourse and consideration like challenges to their counterparts which harm human beings.
Thus, news is a medium of choice for industries to advance their public-relations campaigns, which provide a large portion of what is presented as news. Every industry has animal-abuse components. Those that don’t use nonhuman animals as products or ingredients in their products use materials and substances acquired through degradation or poisoning of nonhuman animals’ natural homes and ecosystems. Packaging and transport of products abuse nonhuman animals through pollution, collisions with animals, and more. News rarely mentions any of the abuse of nonhuman animals that is the basis of consumer-capitalism.
A humanist-extremist institution, news provides facts related to mostly high-status human beings and their values, interests, and concerns. This approach to informing the public ensures that the vast scope of human misery and animal abuse – all that human beings do to and with other animals and their natural homes – is little known and therefore cannot be meaningfully addressed. News keeps the public mind in a perpetual state of unreality which citizens must do their utmost to correct if moral progress is to be made, moral injury overcome, and suffering reduced.
Civilization and human misery are rooted in animal abuse. But that understanding is excluded from news. That understanding burdens human beings with moral injury, making people unhappy because human beings are moral apes, biologically, morally, and spiritually unsuited to harming each other or nonhuman animals, let alone enslaving and industrializing them as they have done for thousands of years. Animal abuse is unnatural, but news maintains public perception of it as natural and normal, as unavoidable reality.
Intensive, thorough rationalization and suppression, avoidance, and denial of reality have always been crucial to animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice. News is a major engine of these anti-intellectual tricks. Like all other institutions that inform, news also ignores and suppresses in order to maintain large audiences, profits, careers, and status – truth-telling is unpopular and therefore marginalized.
As long as news refuses to tell the truth about animal abuse and resulting human misery, no progress is likely toward improving the human quality of life or reducing animal abuse and our species’ annihilation of the living world. RPA’s Elephant in the Newsroom campaign works to change longstanding anti-life news policies and practices.
How
RPA constantly communicates with news venues, their spokespersons, writers, executives, editors, producers, and staff by email, mail, submissions of op-ed articles and letters for publication, and requests for coverage of RPA’s work. RPA sends them literature, Internet links, and other material revealing their faulty framing of animals, including human beings; their constant factual errors resulting from their humanist-extremist and speciesist ideologies; and other ways they perpetuate animal-abuse policy, culture, and practice and harmful impacts on human beings.
With a foundation grant and donations from RPA members, RPA is preparing Elephant in the Newsroom: A Free Newsperson’s and Citizen’s Guide to Accurate and Truthful Reporting on Animals, Including Human Beings. Elephant in the Newsroom will be mailed to hundreds or thousands of people who influence news policy and practice; many more newspersons will be directly informed of the Guide; and it will be available free of charge to all at RPA’s website.
We urge all concerned about animal-abuse culture and resulting human misery to take part in RPA’s Elephant in the Newsroom campaign. Pay close attention to news – on radio, on television, in print, on the Internet – and insist on accurate and truthful discourse regarding all animals and an end to speciesist reporting, commentary, terminology, and framing. Since faulty news is everywhere, always, and we can’t respond to everything, let RPA assist you in using your valuable time as effectively as possible.