Search This Blog

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Media Manipulation

Nowadays, manipulating the media is a very popular mechanism between governments and news channels. They twist the information for their convenience, in elections, or just to keep the people happy and on their sides. That`s why I encourage you to go a little further, inform yourself well and don`t let the government to make your opinion, look for other sources than your local news channel and make your own valid and objective opinion. 
A very representative example about this is what happened with The Gaza Strip Conflict in Israel in 2014. If you start watching news from different countries you are going to notice that depending on the relationship that each country has with Israel and the amount of Palestine population, the news channels of each country change some facts and focus in different things. 

For example, in Chile there is the biggest Palestine pupulation,
 outside The Gaza Strip and The West Bank. Of course that they are going to support their "country" and that`s perfect, so maybe here in Chile it`s politically better to blame Israel in the news instead of giving an objective opinion about the conflict, because doing that you are going to have a lot of people happy. The problem is when people who really don`t understand the conflict start fighting for a cause just because they heard something in the news.
  A situaton like this happened  in the first semester of 2014 when near twenty thousand people marched in the streets of Santiago against Israel, suggesting to cut relations with this country inmediately, calling Israel a criminal country just because they heard in the chilean news facts that made look Israel as an opressive country and guilty of everything. Because if you watched Chilean news you would have only heard when Israel attacked Palestine but not even one opportunity in which Israel was being attacked. But the thing is that if you look for information in some objective sources, you are going to see that in some days more than a hundred rockets were fired to Israel, that means that the information that most of the Chileans received wasn`t fair at all, it was being manipulated to make Israel look guilty. 

Another situation like this happened in Venezuela, when well known news channels started using an image taken in Egypt trying to topple Maduro´s government. In this image you could see two soldiers dragging a woman and kicking her.The thing is that this happened in Egypt, not in Venezuela, even the uniform of the soldiers that you could see in the picture was the egyptian one. But as most of the people believe everything they hear at the news, people from all around Venezuela and some parts of South America started talking about the brutality of the police in Nicolás Maduro´s government until some people who go a little further and do not believe in everything they watch in the news, noticed that these Venezuelan soldiers were really Egyptian soldiers and were able to bring down this Calumny.

Concluding, after this two cases I talked about, I would express my opinion about this horrible mechanism called Media Manipulation. I strongly believe that this shouldn´t be used by any country or institution because in addition to lying to your people, you may create serious misunderstandings like the ones I just mentioned. That´s why I encourage everyone to go further and stop believing in everything you hear, inform yourself and make your opinion taking information from several sources with different insights and doing this I assure you are not going to be manipulated again.


No comments:

Post a Comment