For 12 days now, there has been one and only one news dominating the US media - "Crisis in the Middle East". The latest count puts the death toll close to 300. At the same time that the war was happening, over 200 lives were lost in Mumbai blast, more than 700 people died in Indonesia Tsunami, more than 500 people were killed in a typhoon in China, and on an average 50 people died everyday in car bomb in Iraq. Th Chineese typhoon, in particular, has gone totally unnoticed and I was surprised that most of the people I talked to were not even aware of this tragedy. News of 4 people dying in Philadelphia due to heat wave got twice as much coverage as most of the other news. Depending on what you see and read, the biggest news last week could have either been the crisis in the middle east or Bush using "expletive" while talking to Blair or the "terrible" heat wave in US and western Europe or the Mumbai blast or Floyd Landis making a remarkable come back in the tour de france.
Is our world, restricted to the Media around us or is Media around us serving us the world we want to know ? The latter could be true if we can be sure that the Media is not controlled by the government of political bigwigs or wealthy industrialists. If we start with the assumption that most form of Media is controlled by a chosen few, then it implies that a chosen few control the world we see and hear about.
Its true that we are not forced to subscribe to a particular newspaper or watch a particular channel. A rational person would gather his information from different sources and draw his conclusion. But the underlying assumption here is that the facts he gathers from these sources are accurate. There are some facts that is universal, its potrayed by all and sundry, and we can safely assume that they are correct. But then there always facts which are reported only in a certain section of media, to propogate their point of view. Given these, how do we sift between fact and fiction ?
Sometimes it feels like all of us are participants of a huge "Truman Show". Our opinions on issues are only restricted to what we see and hear. It would be an interesting experiment to raise two identical twins by exposing them to two totally different kinds of media. For example, one kid could be raised on Fox Channel, and one on MSNBC. I am sure this would lead to the first instance of a staunch liberal and a hard core conservative living under the same roof. So is there a neutral media ? A media which covers news from all angle, which is fair, and reports the cold hard facts. They are many out there, who make the above claims, unfortunately there is none who translate those claims into deeds.
7 comments:
Even when the facts are presented, by omitting a few facts and by highliting some others, a totally different picture can be presented. I think the thing to do is get your facts from many different sources and regard everything else as opinion. Regarding what stories get covered more, I think its purely business. The demographics demand that local news be given more coverage than international news even though on a human level, the tragedy might be greater overseas. How many times have you thought about or had a discussion about the AIDS crisis in Africa or farmers getting displaced in China? Hundreds of thousands of lives are getting affected by both, but its just a fact that its not important to us. Or basically that we don't care.
Where is the desist photo? which account?
The twins concept although pretty neat is kinda impractical. Mebbe the guy who made supersize me and does similar shows for periods of 30 days on some channel co do something similar to see the change in his views
Have you read the book "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky?
Have a go at it.
In regards your last post, I recommend you read this book.
@Anarkist...I am not completely sure if demographics completely dictate the news that they see...I feel a lot of it is controlled by government and influential ppl..
I will try to get hold of the book u recommended too..
@Totti.....its sent to ur psu id
@Rohan..The supersize me guy is going to spend 30 days in a prison and document the life of a prisoner...its going to release soon..
@Jinguchaka...No I havent read this book...I shall try to get hold of it..
I kind of agree that political powers do kind of control what we hear and listen and read, but that kind of changes with the place you are in. More so in places like China and maybe earlier USSR, and less so in today’s modern Western world. I think it’s more with the commercial aspect. It’s what we want to hear and listen and read. There is always a certain bias in the mind of most of the common people. Let’s say this bias is in the favor of their own country being more superior or their own religion being better and all those things. Again these biases are formed over the years and might be a result of these media reports to begin with, but there could be other factors too. The point is, now having this bias, I am not going to like a report bashing my own country or my religion and so forth and would always love to read something praising it. Or maybe even when putting the same facts, but putting it in a manner that makes the whole picture more rosy. So in the end, the TV channels and newspapers are going to report more of these stories. Say for example, Fox is playing to the tunes of conservative republicans. It’s niche market. TOI in India is getting more readers and more website hits by acting as a tabloid and not a news paper per say.
But then there are always places that try their best to report the hard facts, but it’s never easy to determine how true these facts are, because we are by now already so very distrustful of all the media. So I guess it’s not that easy to get the truth, because truth is what powers in control can make you believe in. More like Orwellian history, where Big Brother could change it every time he wanted and generation to come won’t even know about it.
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