Being someone to lean on

“Well, no matter who you are,

And no matter what you’ve done

There will come a time

When you can’t make it on your own”

“I Need a Miracle” – Third Day

Third Day is long-term veterans in the Christian music scene, originally formed by Mac Powell and Mark Lee when they were in high school in 1991. The group worked the slow progression from local artist to independent artist to a major record label, and now, 35 years into their musical journey, the group is reuniting this year for a short tour after previously retiring from recording and touring in 2018.

“I Need a Miracle” was the first single released from the group’s eleventh studio album, “Miracle,” in 2012. The song features two people who are down on their luck and at their lowest point and turn to God in desperation.

I picked the song this week because of the quoted section. I asked last week what exactly is desired by the community from the paper, and that quote struck a chord with why we do what we do how we do it.

Certainly, we are in an era of world technology development where artificial intelligence reigns supreme. Unfortunately, that means that anything that has been printed or spoken on a podcast or radio show now informs AI when it provides an answer to a search query.

When surveyed on the “hot-button” topics, Americans consistently respond contrary to the popular narrative. The running narrative is that we are heavily divided as a country, and the division in the United States is informing and inspiring heavy division in other parts of the world as well. What an embarrassing thing to inspire!

Instead, surveys show that Americans frequently answer nearly every touchy issue in a typical statistical bell curve, with the majority of responses focused in the middle. We generally agree on the majority of issues, whether Republican or Democrat, Black or white, male or female, or whatever other potentially divisive grouping we could utilize to fan the flames of division.

Those surveys, however, do not match up to a social media click-driven world. What we hear is certainly not where most of us sit – the middle. We hear a heavily forced bias toward one side or another of an issue.

I recently observed an article about a bill in Pierre that went through voting. One group of newspapers reported on the bill with a slant that heavily favored passage of the bill. Multiple other news sources in the state pushed a narrative that the bill was a very negative thing, based solely on their headlines. The headlines for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and South Dakota Searchlight on this particular bill’s article were most neutral, in my reading on this one story.

The crazy part? Nearly every article was the same once you clicked in to read. Those with a bias, one way or another, focused on quotes from legislators who supported their side of things, while SDPB and Searchlight each used a collection of quotes from both sides of the discussion. The non-quoted details reported, however, were basically the same in every article, though, no matter the headline.

I was recently told that the headlines for our articles in the Plainsman are often “dull.” Quite frankly, in a world of clickbait and AI-informed misinformation, I’d rather find a dull headline that I can trust on content rather than an eye-catching headline with content that could be swayed to back up the headline.

Our goal here at the Plainsman isn’t going to be first to push out information online or to grab your clicks on social media. The goal is to be a source of reliable news that you can trust when it comes to reporting tough issues. Sure, that means our stories may lack the flavor of something reported elsewhere on the same topic, but we hear over and over how our readers value the quality of content, and that will always be a goal.

We can’t make it on our own, and we rely on the great work done by places like Searchlight, SDPB, and South Dakota News Watch to bring you statewide stories. We rely on video coverage of school board and city commission meetings. Most of all, we rely on you to provide us information that impacts you, so we can, in turn, share that information with the greater Heartland community.

As of today, we are nearly 200 days into our “miracle,” when we were purchased and reopened after an unexpected shutdown. We have not taken a single day of providing the community with quality news for granted since, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon!