Up Close and Personal
with CTM founder, Phillip Day

Ah, it had to end sometime.

Now it's back to work, appalled at how much we indulged ourselves. 2006 is here and there are those look-back programs to the previous year: bombings, earthquakes, tsunamis, hostage executions. You ask yourself what terrors 2006 will hold.

A new year. Another blank canvas. Another chance to get it right. How many reading this were personally caught up in the bad news reported in 2005? A few, though not many. For the rest, these were ethereal images, events we did not personally experience, which defined another year of our lives, the year London got it (again), Katrina drowned New Orleans, Indonesia was washed away, and the ground shook and lo, Pakistan was reduced to a rubble.

Holding your breath for the bird flu?

How about this for a great New Year's resolution: Switch off the media and get yourself a life. Your own. Try for a month and see how you feel. No Agatha Christie murders, no Kill Bill, no soap opera traumas piped to us through the same idiot box that gives us our opinions. Michael Hoffman studied media in depth and was not impressed:

"I remember Budd Dwyer's televised suicide. The Pennsylvania official prefaced his broadcast TV self-immolation with a quote from one of his associates who told Dwyer that the American people had become too jaded about 'routine' investigations into political corruption on TV's 60 Minutes and 20/20 to care very much about the corruption Dwyer sought to expose.

Mr Dwyer decided that a population so jaded would need a spectacular sacrificial victim to shake it awake from its apathy and therefore shot himself in front of TV cameras at a news conference.

But his televised suicide did no such thing. Instead it became, like virtually everything else that appears on television, a trivialised part of the entertainment videodrome. It merely raised the stakes for the next human life to exceed, in terms of violence and horror and brutalisation, as public fare."

We expect bad news, nay, pay for it and have our fill on the way to work. Media injects the much-needed frisson into boring lives with the usual conflicts against the odds: Eastenders, Neighbours, holding Rorkes Drift against the Zulus, a famous personality losing the fight against cancer. The cumulative assault on our psyche is overwhelming, which is actually the point. 'The whole aim of practical politics,' H L Mencken wrote, 'is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.' On a conscious level, we know it's a fiction. Subconsciously, it becomes something else.

Who asks the uncomfortable questions? Why are there no documentaries on the corrosive power of 'news'? Without the media, what would 'terrorism' play to? Who's going to blow up an airliner if they won't gain the leverage of a world stage from which to put their case? Ever wondered what would happen if you drenched yourself with good things? ITN used to do good news as an afterthought, though none of that was any of our business either. Trevor McDonald would smile "...and finally…." and go on to tell about 'The Tamworth Two', a pair of pigs who escaped the slaughterhouse and were on the run from their executioners. The joys of irony.

This month's EClub is a great one to kick off the year. My featured article from The Little Book of Attitude is entitled 'Guarding Input'. I shall be talking more on physical health and emotional freedom as the year progresses, how to gain the measure of our lives, how to achieve big things (even if they are little things), and some great new subjects.

Need a jump-start to the New Year? My UK and Ireland Tour is entitled What's News? and embarks at the University of Kent, Canterbury, on 16th January. Grab some tickets, come along and see for yourself what all the fuss is about. Have a look at the schedule to find the meeting nearest you.

Or you could stay indoors and watch TV instead.

Happy New Year.

Phillip