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Let it be what it is

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…Let it be what it is, so that what it is may get better

Journalism means words and truth; accurate reporting and documentary photography; spotlights shining on us and lighthouses in the dark seas, the stormy ones and the calm ones. Journalism should never promote anything but the truth. No matter what the truth is - the greatest evil or the most wonderful pastime. But is there a more powerful and more desirable way to promote communication and dialogue, than to promote it through journalism and debate?

When we take off our own mask for someone, when we accept to discover the different and learn about the different, when we admit to ourselves and other people that there are different realities, beliefs, experiences, opinions and values; when we want to and strive to learn about the world around us – that is our conditioning training that can help us extend our own freedom and teach us to respect the different.

Perhaps the amount of assurance that I have when I defend this truth is the same as my disappointment when I have to admit that those bright examples are rare.

It hurts to notice, or come across such a lightbearer sitting in the dark. Microphone holders, spinners, propagandists, businessmen, self-censors, amateurs, chauvinists, sluggards, ignorants and other twerps and mediocre people do not connect people, because they do not release the truth. They are the jailers of our freedom, the abductors of our mutual understanding and slaughterers of our more beautiful future.

I argued that our region was not cracked by ethnic hatred, but deprofessionalization of institutions, the time when people stopped being professionals and became workplace time wasters, hijackers of their own social obligations and executors of the value system.

And I know that the media and the 'journalists' played a big role in it, one of the main ones; journalists and their words; not always the words of truth. I also know that it is difficult to get rid of these roles, that in our jobs, we are Serbs or Albanians first, that we support our own sides, and that we are "journalists" after that.

 

Bad politics and non-professionals still do their thing and this is the truth that journalists must convey, if we want to understand each other as free individuals and make space for dialogue - because trust can also be built on the ugly truth.