Exploring the alternatives

Subject: Exploring the alternatives

It goes almost without saying these days that we are in the throes of the ubiquitous headline and our attention span is about as long as we take to read that headline.
The sheer volume of information flowing around about our fellow citizens across the world is burdened by the editorial importance the narrative has when directed by an organisation to sift  through the stories based on the editors opinion or prejudice as to what and how we should be informed.
Reading an historical perspective of Ancient Commerce and the importance it had on the growth of ideas and the upsurge of many engineering masterpieces' which formed the bedrock of a number of major cities, the like of which it took a thousand years and more to bear upon what we know and produced here in the West. 

Communication flowing out of and between those areas now  known as the cradle of civilisation, The Fertile Crescent. Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ancient India and Ancient China was the essence of what made the area prosper and I can't think of a better reason to turn to the media channels such as Al Jazeera in Doha or TRT in Turkey to gain insight into the region.
Of course today we see only turmoil in Iran, Syria, Iraq, despotic governance in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and also in India and China. The birth of religion in these areas has born little fruit when it comes to its fundamental tenant of 'brotherly love' and the inter factional wars which identifies these countries where the 'Silk Road', all those millennia ago, developed a civilised method of expressing the importance of becoming civilised.
Today programs produced and broadcast by Al Jazeera and TRT, the regional media seem to have a blend of the early Reithonian  ideal where news was presented and discussed as the actual news acted out across the globe without the need of a talk over presenter who's job it seems is to make themselves the centre piece of the newscast. I am always alarmed at the way the BBC in particular  seem to want to dumb down the news with a display of folksy camaraderie between the the male and female presenters. Somehow the news gets lost in the showbiz, and and we the viewer have difficulty in defining reality television from what is real.