onbeing.org · 1 hour ago

David Bornstein — on Our Lives with the News | the on Being Project

Journalist David Bornstein has spent decades watching his own profession do something quietly destructive: treating the exposure of what's broken as the whole of its job, leaving people drowning in diagnosis with no sense of treatment. In this conversation with Krista Tippett, he names the cost plainly - "the human nervous system becomes the limit," he says, and people are taking out the batteries of the smoke detector because it beeps every time they cook. What emerges from their exchange isn't a critique of journalism so much as a reckoning with a deeper failure of care: the way a culture of information can become unmoored from the people it was meant to serve, leaving them more afraid, more isolated, and less capable of acting on what they know. Bornstein points toward something both practical and quietly radical - a journalism, and a way of speaking to one another, built around the question of what it means to be genuinely helpful, to show people you have their backs, to surface not just what is wrong but what is possible. "There is nobody you couldn't love if you knew their whole story," a friend's email signature once read - and that, perhaps, is the story journalism has yet to learn to tell.