| Sunday Musing: Seeking a positive media | Send to a friend |
| Saturday, 21 January 2012 18:53 |
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We are made to believe that news is whatever is presented to us as newsworthy on the daily pages of our newspapers and what makes the headlines on radio or television. The media prides itself about its objectivity. But one can question the fact as to whether the media really presents us with an objective picture of what is going on in the world. Through our media we mostly learn of negative news like wars, civil unrest, calamities, accidents, mishaps, crime, fraud, violence and whatever goes wrong. And we are supposed to believe that this is the only reality of our society. Certainly this is not true because every day in most lives, more goes right than wrong. Take an example of Africa. There are 53 countries on the African continent. Yet only a few make the news, often so negatively that people overseas believe that Africa is a place of continuous disaster, crime and poverty. Rarely is it mentioned that the per capita income of some African countries is comparable to the per capita income of other well developed economies. The media has an obligation to report what happens in the world, not just what goes wrong. When a research group analysed the front pages of a British newspaper during a two-week period they found that there was only one positive story against 17 negative stories. In the 1970s – at the height of the Cold War – the same newspaper had one positive story against 3 negative stories. These numbers make us believe we are living on a planet where most things go wrong despite the major progress and positive changes in the world. Notwithstanding the threat of terrorism, we live in a more secure world than we did thirty years ago when millions died from diseases that have cures today. Barbarism and violence were even prevalent then and did not begin on 9/11. While terror can’t be condoned and has to be fought in a pragmatic way, the media should not, by negative reporting, create a bias in thoughts that often incites civil unrest or hate crimes. In the aftermath of the April 19, 1985 Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building the immediate presumption by the media was that the bombing was done by Muslim terrorists. This resulted in 222 officially registered ‘hate’ crimes and harassment against Muslims in America in the days immediately following the bombing. Much damage control then had to be undertaken, sometimes by the very newspapers that made the biased presumptions. It was Timothy McVeigh who undertook the bombing which killed 168 people. He was executed on June 11, 2001. A typical example of the lack of positive reporting is that of Nike. In 1997, when Nike produced a sneaker with a design on the heel that resembled the Arabic word for the Almighty, the company was notified and officially apologised and recalled the products carrying the design. The company even launched an investigation as to how the logo came about. As a gesture of goodwill, Nike built a number of children’s playgrounds near some Islamic Centres in the US. While there was much publicity about the wrong that Nike did, there was little publicity about their positive response when alerted on the issue. In a world of seven billion people there are many positive actions like the Nike example that go unreported but need to be publicised. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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