The Epidemic Called Truth

Not long ago, 

not even a lifetime by human measure,

but just about a lifetime in dog years, ago

journalism had teeth.

It had a spine.

A word could carry weight,

a fact could pierce,

a half-hour on television

could tilt the world.

News was effort, sweat, dirt under fingernails,

running shoes on cracked streets,

ink-stained fingers trembling over truths too hot to hold.

The world believed in it,

or at least, it pretended well enough.

A couple of decades later, 

just about a lifetime of dog years later, 

the news has gone feral,

and journalism has gone to the dogs.

Fangs retracted, morality chewed to pulp.

Algorithms pulse where editors used to bleed once.

Stories are currency.

Subscriptions are loyalty.

Sellability is power.

Truth? Optional.

Facts? Discarded in favor of spectacle.

Poverty is profitable.

Wars are widgets.

Death is entertainment.

Every scream, every cry, measured in impressions,

every tear, weighed for virality, 

because journalism is an epidemic today.

Even protest, poetry, democracy, every destitute truth-teller

are all but commodities.

All bought, all sold,

all measured against what sells best.

No more lines etched into conscience.

Only dashboards for flesh and bones

and graphs screaming growth, for voice.

Everything becomes consumer grocery.

Everything bends over to commerce.

And dancing death trance

here comes artificial intelligence,

the last nail on the coffin,

wryly grinning at every human idiocy,

every collapse,

every greed-fed failure.

Every tragedy is but a data point,

every grief but a thumbnail.

We are exposed,

not for reckoning,

but for consumption.

We scream for justice.

We wear slogans like amulets.

We cry for the dead,

then sell the dying and the tears, for our capitalist clauses.

Everything performative.

Everything optional.

Everything measured.

And all of it counts

only if someone lusts,

only if someone buys.

Journalism once gave a damn.

Now it markets a narrative.

The rest rot in obscurity.

The world itself is a headline,

every human pulse a product,

every breath a return on investment,

every corpse a breaking news headline.

Even rage is reduced to therapy bills.

Even grief is pornography for the empath.

We call it news.

We call it journalism.

We call it progress.

When it’s really a fish market, 

a stinking pile of truths reduced to questionable memories,

where flesh, blood, protest, and poetry

are weighed in worn and torn, filthy cash,

where morality is negotiable,

and truth is an abstract

too subjective to document.

And the irony?

Technology,

our mirror, our god,

doesn’t redeem us.

It amplifies.

It magnifies how brilliantly we’ve failed,

how perfectly we’ve monetized our own collapse,

how even our screams now sell

or don’t.

And the dog years, 

they pass faster than we notice,

faster than headlines raise thier auction stakes,

faster than morality dries off in soiled bedsheets,

faster than life can outlive itself. 

And as the world rots into a singular death,

we become truth and truth becomes us,

a grotesque inseparable flesh of a pointless perpetuity.