✖ let's talk about media criticism
Thanks for the guy who decided it was fun to have, what? A bat for lunch, we've faced a situation where my generation has never been before. Or not that us millennials would recall it.
I mean, SARS - was that something to eat? And Ebola? Well, that affected mainly in Africa. We've lived through that, but we haven't really lived through that. Have we?
But covid-19, that stopped all of us going outside, having fun and apparently using our brains.
I want to talk to you guys about media criticism, and I cannot stress enough how important it is. We're living an era of misinformation, we're living in an era, where the journalist ethics and all that important shit is pressured down by the effect of the Internet and social media, where they feel the need to push all the news out in the news outlets as fast as possible. You've seen huge headlines on tabloid websites, right? But when you actually open it and it's recently posted, there might be one sentence of the news following with another sentence, "this article will be updated soon". And that's the best-case scenario. I mean, there has been news with a bunch of bullshit in it and afterwards edited the facts in it.
That's simply the result of the pressure, of the world we are living in. They need to push news out there right at the very moment they receive it. They need to push news out there without flowing it through the copywriter. News after news, after the news. They've lost the importance of quality, while quantity and clicks are all they nowadays care about. And why? It brings them money.
The media criticism is something rare, I reckon. It's something, that should be taught in schools. Actually, I've heard from my younger brother who is now what? A 10-year-old, that they've been talked at school about media criticism. And that's something that should've been done when the Internet arrived amongst us. Or at least 16 years ago, when Facebook brought us the thing you can do on the Internet, which is now called social media.
The very problem of social media and the Internet itself is that everyone has access to it. Don't get me wrong, that's the way it should be, BUT HOLY SHIT KAREN, who asked you to share your Farmville progress on Facebook every other hour?
No, to be honest, I'm a firm believer that the Internet should be made accessible to everyone and it should be a basic human right, and like in Finland, the government should guarantee that everyone has the access to it.
The core problem is that everyone has access to the Internet. There are people who know how to use their brain and the people who aren't necessarily blessed with the ability to use them. And that's where the importance of media criticism comes along. If you know how to use your brain, you also know that not everything in the world wide web is true. You know that it's not good for anyone to go out there blindly and believe everything you see. I mean, if there's something suspicious on your plate in a restaurant, would you eat it?
The thing is, you don't have to believe everything you read. While you're reading things online, check up these two things while you're reading: is the news source reliable and has it been right before?
Due to COVID-19 info, it's all fairly new to us. It's obvious that there is misinformation going on since we don't know a lot of things about it, however -- in every country, there is a website like THL (in Finland) or NHS (in the UK) which will give us the correct information about the whole situation. Tabloids are just feeding their click counter with spreading hysteria writing big headlines.
Yes! In the beginning of this whole thing, I was following the unfolding of it all like it was a soap opera. Checking the newest headlines in the morning and evening, wondering what the newest plot development would be. Now, I'm so saturated with info, I have to be really careful to avoid it until I'm actively trying to read the news. Because people are just sharing and posting things at will - often without having read the article.
ReplyDeleteI genuinely believe that the biggest problem with it (and with education in America), is that people aren't taught critical thinking or to question themselves. Like a simple "what about this article makes me believe it? Is my belief system affecting my judgment of this editorial?"
Anyway, great piece.