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How Media Promotes Bigotry by Mackinley Clevinger, April 27, 2016
A common issue in recent months for the United States of America has been the daily instances of racial intolerance and acts of hate against the social classes designated as being minorities; essentially, anyone that isn’t the typical white person, such as Muslims, black people, Sikhs, or anyone else that doesn’t fit into the category designated by bigots as being acceptable.
This manner of behavior is deplorable without a doubt; to target anyone as a subject of hate and aggression is an evil act not fitting for the modern type of civilization we should be enjoying peacefully and together, and to base the subject of such abuse and terror on the skin tone, cultural background, or religious beliefs is harking back to a past that we should be moving away from, not trying to recreate now.
However, this kind of behavior does not just happen on its own. We are not born with a predesigned view of the world that tells us who’s a part of the in-crowd and who should be turned away from society; we learn this and all other kinds of behavior from numerous sources: our family, our friends, the people we meet and spend time around in day to day life, and, especially, the media.
Except, that is, from the news and other media sources, which profit off of telling people about events going on both far away and closer to home. For many people, what they believe about foreign cultures and their people is directly controlled by what the media tells them, so it’s a good thing that you can typically find balanced views and respectful approaches to complex situations that tell both sides of the story to allow for the viewer to make a personalized and unbiased choice, right?
Yes, that was sarcasm. Evidence of the skewed view that the world can have on the same matter is clearly present in just how many news organizations exist that all report on the same things, but tell them in immensely different ways that could vastly confuse a person in how far to either extreme these organizations will go from each other.
Comparing Fox News to MSNBC, for example, in reference to political matters in the United States of America. When their president, Barack Obama, gave a State of the Union address, Fox News spoke of how his values and ideas were anti-America and would bring about the downfall of their nation, while MSNBC was aglow with positive spin and admiration of their president. These are both different representations of the truth in vastly different ways that tell conflicting stories to the same audience.
The news, then, is not unbiased, and is actively trying to put forward their idea of events to make the public think in a way that promotes their own ideology and interests. The media possesses considerable power over their viewers as well, the trust emplaced within these organizations often absolute, and to try and change the minds of someone who has been spun is quite difficult.
The news is, of course, not always right. Sometimes they just make honest mistakes, and they correct themselves, but not before that idea has been planted in the minds of millions, and statistics alone says that many of them won’t hear the correction anytime soon. For example, there was a radio play of War of the Worlds many years ago about an alien invasion, and people believed it was an actual news report and thought the world was ending. Not anything serious, more something to laugh about and move on in life once discovering it wasn’t true.
On a darker note, however, false reporting of an incident where nearly a hundred people were crushed to death at a football game in Hillsborough in England led to nearly three decades of court activities before the truth finally came out on how the police were largely to blame for the incident, where reporting had said it was savage drunken fans who forced the gates and led to the tragic deaths, which then influenced politicians and people all over England to believe a lie while families grieved.
The news has immense power over people, and it is their duty to use that power responsibly to give factual and unbiased reporting on matters that is fair and balanced. As said before, however, each news station has its own prerogative in terms of how they present information, or if they even report on something at all. This means that you can’t implicitly trust the news, which is truly a shame. Not every person in a country can personally take the time to go out and discover the truth for themselves, so we have to leave it up to trusted organizations to do it for us, and when we can no longer trust those sources, how are we supposed to know the truth?
It’s easy to say that the responsibility must then lie on us to pick out what’s true or not in reporting and try to make our own informed opinions on matters, but when we’re relying on others to know what and how to think on things, it isn’t that easy to realize they might be wrong or confusing the matter without intense research. Many of us are too busy to fact-check everything we hear, so little things are going to get through the filter and news that has been spun will be what we believe.
This kind of event has been seen especially in the last few years when the matter of Muslims in the United States came to the forefront of everybody’s minds due to increased activity of groups such as ISIS in distant nations. In a fair and honest world of reporting, there would be a clear distinction made between extremist groups and the majority of practitioners of Islam, just as not all Christians expound upon the beliefs of the Klu Klux Klan and wish death to black people. Most Christians are nothing like that, just as most Muslims are nothing like ISIS.
However, many people have different ideas about the matter than the rational one just stated, and the news and other media sources are wonderful platforms for anyone to speak their minds on social matters of importance. It’s important for these diverse ideas to come together and be acknowledged and discussed, but ultimately the choice of who gets to say what comes down to the news outlets themselves. And the news outlets are, above all else, now, a business.
Conflict gets peoples’ attention, and peoples’ attention gets news outlets money, so instead of the balanced and unbiased approach to presenting news and these social issues, you’ll get soundbites and interviews galore on people who believe that all Muslims should be shot by bullets coated in pig’s blood, and perhaps one person on one day saying something in defense of their fellow human beings.
Currently, one of the largest venues of conflict in America is going on: The presidential election, and the news make it a point to report on everything the candidates are doing; so long as they’re interesting, and promote the interests of the news outlet. A recent look at reporting on presidential candidates found that one man who constantly promotes violence and the dehumanization of minorities in America received more coverage than the entirety of the political party opposing him; Donald Trump, as of a study in December of 2015, had 234 minutes of airtime versus 226 minutes of the entire Democratic party.
That is not fair and balanced reporting, and it turns the news into a platform for the spreading of bigotry and hatred that has undeniably led to a rise in violence towards Muslims and other social groups. The over-coverage of a single candidate in an election will have a deep impact on the minds and hearts of the people who are going to be voting, and when they haven’t been faced with an alternative option that they can believe in, a man is going to be voted into office by writ of being the most popular due to media interference where the bottom line is not morality or journalistic integrity, but in how much more money they get from a man who screams hatred than from reporting on policy.
The media has been given immense power over the people in America, so much so that they serve as an impromptu fourth house in their system of checks-and-balances for political power. They are supposed to tell the people how it is so that the people can decide how they think about it and what they’ll do in response, but the news has strayed from that path in the interests of furthering the agendas of individuals and in making sure people are entertained, not informed.
The old adage goes that with great power comes great responsibility, but there really is no one to hold the news accountable for what they’ve devolved to, except for a populace that has two choices: Stop watching, which leaves them uninformed even of the spun versions of the news, or continue watching and express displeasure with the service you’re being provided, which still puts money in the pockets of the news outlets.
Something needs to be done to stop the current trend of media preferring to allow bigots to have the floor and spread their hate towards Muslims and all other races while muting the voices that need to be heard for the people to genuinely be informed of what is going on around them in their country and in their world. This trend is leading people to commit acts of aggression and possess a hatred towards people that is wholly arbitrary, and it has gone on for far too long in a country that calls itself civilized while its media paints a target for its citizens to go after like trained dogs for the sole benefit of these news outlets and the people pulling their strings.