(Portrait of Machiavelli, from the Peace Palace Library's Il Principe, published in 1769)
I'm glad my love for writing doesn't depend on my Journalism degree. I left the spotlight of fame and power and focused in other pure creative areas of journalism the very first time I was threatened as a employee of a great but misguided newspaper for simply sticking with the truth. Then, later again received my awakening from a masked proud media company totally lost between its mission and the hypocrisy of seductive profit. Time and time again discernment has made me stand against the threat that I couldn't vote for anyone but for the government nominee or I'd suffer a "accidental suicide" of my career, job, ideology, and freedoms.
Tragic and nauseating it is to watch NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Globo, and even Fox News today, and not feel deep sorrow for the abandonment and complete despise of the laws of Journalism and mass communication, discrimination and hate speech, harassment and stalking, and specially freedom of information and impartiality.
It's extremely sad to see how much television influences undecided and especially young voters and how they have their lives and political attitudes affected, being swayed by political appeals portrayed by their channel of choice.
Unfortunately, the negative agenda-setting role of media and politics is decided by money dumped into political campaigns, not with the intention to give people the chance to even know a candidate, only the leverage to reshape the country's economy in their favor.
Campaigning is just a game. The real issue is when their candidate start governing and put aside promised traditional commitments pressured by the supportive font of their pools of money, changing and reinforcing laws to benefit them, but last the middle class that elect them.
We live in an endless cycle of corruption, fact-checked by history that intensify skepticism towards the media, into a contest that rewards anger, pushing elites masquerade as outsiders, showing how much men destroyed granted democracy into a rotten world.
Yet the loss of hope in the future of our families is not our politics and lobbyists fault alone, but ours.
Our vote is the most valued investment we have, so let's do our due diligence: Let's fix the system.
“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones. ”
― Niccolò Machiavelli