Our world is in a precarious state. Humanity has converged on a culture that makes a living from oppressing its most vulnerable and destroying its own habitat.
According to the radical thinker and priest Ivan Illich, “Neither revolution nor reformation can ultimately change a society, rather … If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.”
Stories with the potential to guide those of us who survive the unfolding planetary crises to a more equitable and ecologically viable future do exist — but they don’t get much airtime.
One of the main reasons for this is the news media, which not only focus on the short-term, the dramatic and the negative, but which also embed out-of-date values and assumptions in their reporting — for example the inevitability of inequality, the supremacy of material wealth, violence as a route to peace, the subservience of care, and the irrelevance of the natural world.
By means of such hidden but powerful frames, the “stories” in news media implicitly support and propagate a larger “story” about humanity that is taking us to the brink of global catastrophe.
To support a more constructive story, the news media will need to embed alternative values and different framing. This represents a subtle yet fundamental shift. There does not yet appear to be any other news channel explicitly attempting to implement it.
Such a shift would change two aspects of how news is delivered: the “what” and the “how” — sometimes termed Agenda 1 and Agenda 2.
Agenda 1 is “what they want us to think about” and Agenda 2 is “how they want us to think about it”.
ReStory is designed to demonstrate how such a shift can be made, and what impact it can have on those two dimensions of news reporting.
The aim is to offer and to inspire journalism that is unencumbered by the need to safeguard false assumptions. In particular, ReStory aims to present, amplify and validate stories with practical relevance to this critical, mythic moment in the history of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.