“We are sending our love down the well”

An Episode of The Simpsons and the School of Authentic Journalism

By Hugo Ramírez
School of Authentic Journalism, Class of 2010

November 19, 2009

Hugo Ramírez

For anyone still unsure if you’ll send a donation to The Fund for Authentic Journalism, through which the School of Authentic Journalism – and scholarships for its students – will be made possible, I’d like to remind you (or tell you about it if you didn’t see it) an episode of The Simpsons.

In this episode Bart, using a transistor radio, pretends he is “Timmy O’Toole,” an innocent child who falls down a well. In sum, the episode involves the formation of a large solidarity movement guided by a song titled “We’re Sending Our Love Down the Well” and the disillusion of the people of Springfield upon finding out that it all was a prank.

Bart then falls down the well trying to get back his radio, while everybody in town loses any interest in rescuing him. The repudiation caused by his lie leads everyone in town to turn their backs, including Kent Brockman (the TV news anchor) who ignores the story – now real – of Bart in the well and decides instead to feature a story about “a squirrel that looks like Abraham Lincoln,” a squirrel that later would be assassinated, causing the media to follow the story “all night long if need be.”

My proposal to you, kind reader: Send your love down the well! Think about the mass media, every day farther and farther from reality, and about the traditional journalism schools that mainly work so that the media’s preconceptions are complied with again and again.

I know that many times we have been tricked and disillusioned by the commercial media and I promise that they will continue deceiving. However, that should never become an excuse to stop loving and believing in our ideals. Better to send our love down the well, with the hope of backing the things we believe in, than to stop loving while using the excuses of disillusion and hopelessness.

Don’t fall in the trap. Don’t believe that commercial journalism is invincible and that the realities untold by the big media chains will never be told. Send your love down the well, and maybe you won’t have to keep watching stories from your home like that about a squirrel that looks like Abraham Lincoln.

Donate today, online, at this link:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Or send a check to:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
PO Box 241
Natick, MA 01760 USA

Thank you,

Hugo Ramírez
School of Authentic Journalism, Class of 2010

p.s. Publisher’s Note: You can donate directly to Hugo’s scholarship by clicking this button:

Lea Ud. el Artículo en Español

For more Narco News, click here.