I’m not here to preach, today. I’m here to discuss, to ponder, and mostly to re-evaluate my stance on a media that doesn’t have boundaries when it comes to their influence in shaping the thoughts of society.
The easiest example is terrorism. Whenever there’s a terrorist attack, however minor, the media reports on it, and I criticise it for spreading the message of fear that the terrorists sought to spread in the first place. In my eyes, I often believe that by spreading the news of these attacks, the media are directly delivering to the terrorists their ambitions, and that if they ceased to do so, they would be silencing these groups. And it’s the same with murderers; many of them go on their killing sprees because they want to be famous, if only for a little while, and to get their face and name known for what they did. The media, in my typically formed opinion, is all too happy to oblige as long as they get a damn story out of it.
But over the last year or so I’ve been considering the other side of the argument. It’s the media’s duty to report these things, else they’d be no better than the censored papers of dictatorial countries of eras past and current. They’d be directly lying to society as to the situation of world events, and we’d be even more in the dark on the true events and motivations driving the world than we are already. This, too, would be against everything that I stand for.
So we’ve got a bit of a dilemma here. A crazed murderer goes on a rampage and kills fifteen people at a school somewhere. If the paper prints their name, face, history and motives, the killer (now likely dead due to their cowardice) is getting exactly what they desire – fame, and a country-wide hatred that they bathe in like glory. But if the paper does what I’ve been complaining at them to do for years – that is, if they keep hush about the matter and leave it to the police and the families of the victims – then we, as a society, are being blinded to the truth, and have no chance to take stock of our surroundings and figure out the cause of such pointless insanity. We have no warning that this could happen to us, and that we should always tread the path of rationality.
And we also have a chance to be inspired by this warped mind and go on killing sprees of our own.
Don’t get me wrong; this is not a moral dilemma that I think the papers face. I still believe that they see a profitable story in every tragedy, and to look at this realistically, a floundering business in a dying medium is always likely to choose the monetary advantage over the moral obligation. This, then, is my own moral dilemma – what to yell about on social media when the news inevitably prints front pages dictating “MURDERER” with a mugshot and an incentive to stir up mob mentality.
We don’t have to lump murderers in with terrorism and use the same rule for everybody, however. A murderer is typically one man or woman who has lost touch with reality and has decided to take it upon themselves to cause as much tragedy as possible, with little regard for the future. Terrorism is a more organised attack on the morale of a civilisation who they oppose. Whilst many don’t see past the senseless violence, the true motivation of terrorism is in the name – to cause terror, to sow the seeds of discord amongst a society that is more fragile than its citizens believe. And when the media runs a terrorism story and slaps the same sticker on it as they would with murderers – come hither, my fellow mob, and seethe – then they are, as previously mentioned, only helping those who they claim to be against.
It’s not even as extreme as that. The entire reason that I’ve decided to finally put this moral dilemma to words is that just a few minutes ago, BBC News published a news article named, “GCSE results show significant decline.” Just one minute before this I predicted this headline and preemptively condemned it:
But of course, if we are looking at this from an objective point of view rather than a sympathetic one, it would be folly for the BBC to withhold these statistics in fear that it would wound the feelings of those who saw it. In retrospect, I was likely more angry about those who would inevitably jeer and make light of the hard work put in by today’s youth and in ever-increasingly stressful school life with higher and higher expectations.
To summarise, I suppose I need to accept that journalism can be a neutral, pragmatic thing that doesn’t have to care about anyone’s feelings. I should also keep in mind that it has a duty to keep the public informed as to current events, for the sake of democracy and influencing decisions in a country that chooses its leaders (though that’s a whole other kettle of fish when it comes to media bias.) Perhaps the media should, however, re-evaluate the power it has on impacting society and share less details about those who perpetrate crimes and more about the crimes themselves and the possible cause of events that led us to this possibility.
Perpetually Perturbed 