Media manipulation has become the reality now, it is in everything that you read, watch and hear. EVERYTHING.
News might simply be your word against mine without evidence and evidence is often falsified, distorted, fabricated, exaggerated and destroyed. A great example of how news channels operate is seen in the movie Nightcrawler where these news channels only seem to care about one thing and that is being ahead of competition even if that involves crossing some lines.
Media has almost become one of our primary sense organs, because it is responsible for providing us with information of what is going on around us. False news is a dangerous weapon in the world of media and communication. False news often relies on propaganda, religion and human emotions. Every and I mean every news agency has at some point published false news because false news is smart and so carefully crafted that sometimes even reputed news agencies fall for them and sometimes it’s just human error. Several fact checkers have popped up but they can only scan through very few article’s veracity. In a recent incident a video from Hong Kong was fact checked by “Boomfactcheck”, an independent online resource to debunk fake news, and was incorrectly being used to flag several posts on social media platforms and even used to spread more fake news. False news is not a new concept by far in fact it has existed for a long time. Emperors distorted history by showing defeats as wins, nations distorted history in their respective colonies for the gain of the colony holding nations. Some fake new we have believed in for a long them we simply know them as misconceptions.
We all have received those “WhatsApp forwards” and while some of us can obviously make out how true these forwards are the same fake news could become a fact for you, often such fake news posted on mock news blogs suddenly becomes plausible. It is easy for us to just believe in what we read rather than take some efforts and find out if it is true or not. In another recent incident the Times of India (which has its own fact checking department),Press Trust of India, ANI and a bunch of other news agencies had fallen for fake news on 13th March,2020 these news agencies announced that malls would be closed from that day onwards complementary to WhatsApp forwards and a couple of hours later clarifications and corrections were made and it was announced that malls would remain open. Now this was just a small example that sent people rushing to supermarkets and malls causing huge gatherings. Fake news even caused communal violence and tension between religions.
Media is not only manipulated by the government but also by companies, businesses and even small-time blog runners, it is being manipulated from both sides. A country was found to have been lying about their situation in a war for eight years and the misuse of tax money during the war to not only their citizens but the entire world and was revealed only when certain documents were leaked to a news agency. Media is sometimes manipulated in a minor way sometimes completely. A simple google search will furnish you with thousands of instances of media being manipulated. We believe what we see, hear and read and we can not determine what is going on in Burkina Faso a country you might never even have heard of so we depend on media. This media could be social media posts, YouTube videos, news, TV shows, movies, books, magazines, blogs, etc.
If you repeat a lie just enough it becomes the new truth, this is the same way how false news sometimes become the truth. Media and journalism are in some ways is like super powers it gives us both superheroes and supervillains . Media has helped expose several conspiracies and a form of journalism known as “investigative reporting” has been crucial in exposing human trafficking, mistreatment, situation in conflict zones and scandals. Nellie Bly who went undercover in an insane asylum back in the 19th century to expose the horrors and the patient’s condition, this has been a classical example of investigative reporting other such examples include the “Panama papers” and Wikileaks.
Media is warped from clickbait YouTube videos and paid edit Wikipedia pages is just the tip of the iceberg. Manipulator is the only word for Michael Arrington, a man who once said "Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap". Media Manipulator is actually a job and you can search about Ryan Holiday and check out his book Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulation. The media was a long-trusted source for the public but now all they have broken all barriers and crossed all lines that made the new reliable before. We need to be patient because good information takes time to acquire and the idea that news could be given to us first and be reliable is absurd. I would rather have news that is reliable rather than getting it first.
Now all this may send your head spinning and make you think that a lot of the things that you know and believe may be false, well that is because it is. The fight against fake news is something that we cannot win and may never win, the odds are stacked against us and we have been compromised from the beginning. A bit of skepticism to everything you hear, see or read can help in understanding if something is true or not. This may cause you to question your ideology because you should, and that is how we can move towards being less incorrect. To take inspiration from the book “The Subtle Art of not giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson what we know is not completely true and never could be and we can only become less wrong in life and nothing can ever be completely true.
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