INFACTED

At quarter to five in the morning, things sometimes surface that would be too loud to hear during the day.

Was this thought the result of a wet dream? 
No — as a bed-wetter, I never had my future in mind. 
But the thought itself came around the corner relatively dry.

So, what does “infacted” even mean?
Nothing. 
The dictionary shrugs.

At first glance, this word looks neither familiar nor meaningful out there in the landscape. 
There’s another word lurking behind it — one that my subconscious used to engineer this particular word-bending. 
The original word — yes, in English — is “infected,” meaning contagious, catching, something that spreads.

“Scalpel, please!”
When words get split apart, side effects can follow. Some are funny, some confusing, others strip a word of all meaning. 
Example? In an episode of the German satirical show “Die Anstalt,” a protest sign hung over a railing reading: “solid-arisch.” Ouch. It reads someting like «fundamentally arian» 
Please note: handle word-splitting with care. Because splits can cause divorces.

Now, my soggy word starts making a bit more sense once split. 
“In fact” means in reality, and the tired little “ed” rounds out that reality into a state of being infected. 
So far, so poorly explained.
But the dream kept going — relatively dry, in that half-awake state between sleep and morning. 
And the story goes something like this.

Infacted.
The press once had a wonderful function: to stand as the fourth estate in a democracy. 
Journalism was meant to hold government — its actions, plans, and results — under a scrutinizing lens, to press a finger on sore spots and push. 
Hard. 
Of course it hurts when your own misconduct or failure is laid out clearly in black and white. 
I still remember a line from an editor-in-chief some fifty years ago: “We journalists are the critics, not the friends, of politicians.”

“Journalists serve as independent watchdogs of political power, not as its allies. Their job is to verify facts, investigate information, and report critically. Their code of ethics commits them to the pursuit of truth and the avoidance of distortion — which requires keeping a deliberate distance.” So it reads, in the fine print.

That, as I said, is an echo from more than fifty years ago — one that’s stayed with me ever since.

Long before COVID-19 hit in 2020, countless conspiracy theories had already been mushrooming into the digital sky. 
And trailing along with them, reliably, was that blunt and brutal term: “lying press.”

The term “Lügenpresse” — lying press — can and should be traced back to the 19th century. 
It was originally used in political disputes to challenge the credibility and objectivity of the opposition’s media. 
In Germany, it gained particular traction during the First World War, when the government sought to shape public opinion through censorship and propaganda. 
This tiresome, toxic brand of defamation is currently enjoying quite the resurgence.

Of course, as with all trends and social shifts, there are counter-movements — journalists who return to their ethical foundations. That very commitment has often cost them dearly, when billionaire media owners decide they’d like to have a say in the coverage.

There are countless professional journalists who refused to submit to the dictates of their owners and set out on their own as independent reporters. The bread became leaner — but more honestly earned.

Every day I keep searching for exactly this kind of journalism — the original kind — so I can get news that’s at least reasonably grounded in fact. 
My list of sources keeps growing. 
And with it, the information I get about what’s happening in the world keeps getting richer. 
The clicking around through all those sources, though, keeps getting more time-consuming.

This wordy detour has a point. 
Hard to believe? I know. 
I have a complicated relationship with belief in general.

Somewhere around my second coffee this morning, I glimpsed a vision — a structure, a construct — that could bring these free and principled journalists together inside an online portal while letting them stay free. 
The portal would exist for one purpose only: to make all that clicking unnecessary or less at least. 

Infacted would serve as a portfolio for fact-driven independent journalists — offering people their daily dose of real news, without the clicking and the searching.

No, I have no concrete plans to make this happen. 
No budget, no team, no roadmap. Just a thought that, at quarter to five in the morning, was too stubborn to be ignored.

Maybe that’s the right moment for ideas like this — when the mind is still too tired to talk them down.

In the meantime, I click my way through the guild of independent journalists every day — to stay Infacted.
“The reality of news that infects with facts.”