|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The distribution of information in a society is essential for people to be informed about what is happening around them. Newspapers and other media outlets exist for this role in society. For people to form opinions, which in democratic societies leads to lawmaking, accurate and unedited versions of the truth are necessary. In environments where tyranny and the rule of law are not a respectable position of the government, the suppression of a free press is evident.
Thus, a society that claims to be a democratic one, must allow the free flow of information undeterred by government officials or political partisans to censor what they like and what they don’t. The essence of a public square is for people to debate about ideas, which allows individuals to get to the truth as closely as possible. When the press, however, turns against its viewers by feeding them information that is biased and emotional, the public square is distorted with falsities and lies. This allows for a large portion of the public square to be filled with distortions of reality. Thus, the role of media is vital since it is the only medium where people can come to a sound and valid solution. If these arbitrators of truth turn away from that goal, the consequences are immeasurable.
In 2015 when Donald Trump launched his political career, one of his popular phrases on the campaign trail was the “fake news media”. The media’s reaction to Donald Trump was filled with contempt, mockery, and rage; all these emotions led to a culture where the media wasn’t differentiating between fact and fiction, but was instead synthesizing opinion as fact.
Every time Trump would call the media “fake news”, the media would get filled with rage while using tactics to fight against Trump’s “attacks” on the media; official fact-checkers and misinformation labels on social media sites became popular things to allow censorship of those that resisted establishment, corporate media. Once upon a time, the media industrial complex had a respectable position among the American public for at least attempting at impartiality and objectivity, now the American public has contempt for them. The official “fact-checkers” are mocked as liberal infiltrators and Trump-hating individuals.
One has to answer the obvious question; what would explain the reason behind the media’s unhinge rage against those who dissent? Whatever happened to the concept of political disagreements and dialogue? But you see, that’s the thing, the modern media don’t care about reporting the news because their desire is spreading their ideologies and propaganda that their corporate and political masters officially approve. Asking legitimate questions or pointing out obvious truths to the media if it is made by Donald Trump or some conservative they hate, makes them go on a ridiculous rampage, instead of reporting on what is being discussed in the political arena. If the mainstream media actually had the desire to do their jobs somewhat justly, efforts of sticking to political reporting rather than their political rhetoric would be something that would be emphasized. Instead, their true intentions are revealed when they hash out their hysterical and ludicrous tirades against those they disagree with.
Another story that for years has been in the news, but has been something that the mainstream media has periods of outrage and meltdowns over is about the state of Israel. While many do report on the outrageous behavior of the enemies of the Jewish state, a narrative is constantly drawn out in mainstream media sources attempting to portray a different reality. This alternative reality is the attempt to pretend that those who seek to destroy Israel have a legitimate argument in a “geopolitical conflict” as if these were two sides on a chess board. Using words like Hamas “militants” or “fighters” is saying that Hamas is a group filled with people who are fighting for a legitimate cause. Raping Jewish girls in their beds, burning babies, and taking hostages, to any normal human being with gray matter, isn’t a “legitimate cause”.
Claiming that their efforts for “Palestinian liberation” as a genuine geopolitical problem is ludicrous in the face of the multiple times in history when the Palestinians were offered by Israel, a state right next to theirs. But, even the Palestinians are more honest than the media about their true intentions, because they don’t support a two-state solution to live in peace; they support a one-state Palestinian state where Jews don’t exist since they want to reclaim “from the river to the sea” their “homeland”. Committing terror and violence against Jews doesn’t sound like a legitimate liberation movement in the face of the decades of concessions that Israel has offered. Instead, media outlets like Reuters and the NY Times use terms like Hamas “militants” as if their fight is moral.
Media and newspapers have an essential role in society to allow people to be informed about the world around them. Political discourse in democratic environments needs to be freed from government intervention at all costs, but at the same time, media outlets must recognize the role they fulfill in society. Their role is not to be moral lecturers of who is right and wrong, their role is simply to report on what is occurring; beyond that, people can judge for themselves. When the media decides to take matters into their own hands by reporting political rhetoric as fact, the contempt they have for those who are free-minded individuals shows.
The political evolution that has occurred in recent years in the United States has exposed the hypocrisy and meltdown of the once-respected media. The age of objectivity and factual reporting is non-existent in the age of policing information that goes out to the public. However, the tides are turning as more independent sites like Substack and Twitter continue to gain popularity, and the relevancy of the failed mainstream media continues to fall. May those distorting the realities of what is happening in the world continue to fall into the depths of irrelevancy and oblivion!
