Questionable Outrage at an Ethically Challenged Media (A Moral Dilemma)

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:

Can't wait for the inevitable news headlines that devalue students' #gcseresults and tells them they all did worse than their predecessors.

— Kristian (@Kritigri) August 25, 2016

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.

Lying by Omittance

So to catch you up with British politics if you’re not already aware, our Prime Minister David Cameron is currently under scrutiny for evading tax. One reason why this is a big deal is because if he is indeed dodging tax, he’ll be a hypocrite and a liar, and his promises will now more than ever be revealed as false and the legitimacy of his attitude towards many issues called in to question. Nobody wants a liar for a leader. (And I certainly didn’t vote for him!)

Now, as one can quite imagine, this has riled up public dissatisfaction with our great leader, and there was therefore a rather large protest in front of Downing Street last week, calling for David Cameron’s resignation (or, as some of the more ambitious folk went for, a full on public revolution). #ResignCameron started trending on social media websites sometime before, and continued for some time after, and the crowd that came together in front of Downing Street was rather sizable… sizable enough to make it onto a supposedly unbiased, public-serving news program such as the BBC News, for instance.

It did not.

On BBC News and many of the papers the next day, there was not a single mention of the protest which had gathered outside Downing Street in an attempt to change the leadership of the country – as is our right as a democracy. Calls for a snap election were silenced through the BBC and other news outlets’ deafening ignorance to these events, muting megaphones and bleaching placards blank. 2,000 – 5,000 people were estimated to have gathered, a figure which is apparently not newsworthy.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, the BBC may have gotten away with this. However, due to the rise in social media and camera-phones being readily available, demonstrations such as the protest for Cameron’s resignation no longer rely on the medium of television to be shared, and can instead find its home on social media. What perplexes me is that there is still some journalism which hasn’t cottoned on to the fact that by failing to report such things, public outcry will later follow, painting their own news stations and papers in grim light and reinforcing the idea that the public is controlled through a silent censorship of what makes it into the news which they digest, and take for fact. If journalists do not report on such events, then the people will, and the people are all the more likely to bias things, leave facts out and tarnish the reputation of news resources.

But then, news resources often tarnish themselves. Whilst doing some research for this blog post, I used The Independent’s article as a resource to find out how many people were estimated to have gathered in protest on Saturday. For further frames of reference, I turned to other news sites, and only then discovered through The Mirror’s article that what I had previously understood to be a peaceful protest had apparently descended into violence. I’m no fool; I know that each paper has an ulterior motive, and whilst one will focus on the ignored activism, the other will focus on alleged barbarism.

I’ve said it before on this blog, and I’ll say it again. No matter what ‘wing’ you swing for, if you skew the facts with your bias, you are misrepresenting true events. Journalism should, in my opinion, be an objective tool which is used to present unbiased facts to the public, who can then make their own informed opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong. You may argue that it is impossible not to use a certain level of bias, and perhaps that’s true… but for The Independent to completely omit the fact that some level of violence took place within the protest is almost akin to a lie.

(Quick addition: I do not endorse any particular newspaper in this blog post.)

And let’s not forget where this blog post all started – with BBC News completely omitting the notion of any public unrest taking place on Saturday. The only reason I can think of for them to do this would be so as not to encourage more people to go and join the protest whilst it was still underway, lest it become an unwieldy mob. But it’s been days since this event took place, and there’s still no word from the BBC about it. It’s frighteningly reminiscent of the history lessons in which I learned about how censorship was enforced in societies of old, as a tool to keep the lower class in check.

Democracy is, in theory, supposed to be a solution to give the people a say in the way their lives are allowed to be lived. But as long as we are being manipulated by news resources with an ulterior motive, we cannot look through the manipulation of our government, cannot make an informed decision on the next, and therefore cannot prosper as a society.