“The media lie, they manipulate and we’re better off without them!” Really?
A huge discussion recently started about the media, its responsibilities, function and flaws. We hear repeated allegations of the media lying, wasting our time and functioning like drugs without informing us properly. Whether it is in uni, at home among family and friends or due to the currently changing political orientation in many countries —the topic pops up everywhere. I would like to share some of my thoughts on the topic.
A fact we can all agree on, I guess, is that media, especially mass media, reach a huge group of people through their various channels, influence them in one way or the other and that they therefore hold a lot of power. Having said that, everything that holds a lot of power must be critically questioned to make sure this power is not misused. It is very important to criticise the media, and certainly there is a lot to be criticised. Let’s look at the most prominent accusations the media have to deal with:
News mainly cover what they think people want to see. This may cause an imbalance between what is unnecessarily reported and what is actually important. Also, there is a tendency towards a rather scandalous way of reporting in order to attract users through sensationalism. The media reduce the complexity of a topic and instead focus on emotions to keep people entertained. Since so many people are reached by the media, media channels are also a promising tool for politicians to improve their image, which is often seen as manipulation.
And then there is one more accusation that I stumbled across so many times: “Since I hate the unprofessional way the media are reporting, I do not use them anymore. No TV, no radio, nothing. Still, they force me to pay an obligatory media fee.”
Sure enough there are many more things one could point out about the media that are not running smoothly. We should never stop criticising the media. We need to demand more transparency from journalists and media businesses in general. But the more important question is whether there are possible conclusions that we can draw for ourselves. Because a lot of responsibility lies with us as well. We need to obtain different media sources, also foreign ones, to avoid being informed only one-sidedly. Also, we need to distinguish between tabloids, social media and quality media and we need to understand that not all media process information in a responsible manner. But most importantly, we need to understand that news are produced by humans who have to filter all the information they get and break it down to what they think is most important since there is way too much happening in the world to report on everything. Of course, these “gate keepers”, as they are called in communication science, can make mistakes and of course their selection of newsworthy information is highly subjective. However, these humans can never be replaced by robots, as Leonie Jungen pointed out in her blog post, and we therefore need to invest into good quality journalism to make sure that we’ll get the best possible end result in the media we consume. By the way, this is exactly the purpose of the obligatory media fee in Germany! Media, being so influential and important, need to be invested in to ensure the work is done properly.
Now, there’s one thing we certainly cannot do because we are unhappy with the media the way it is: We cannot just stop informing ourselves, ignoring all the current abuses all around the world, living a life as if there were no other people around us. The media are our only source of information on everything that is going on. Boycotting them because they “waste time” and “make us passive” would be a very egocentric thing to. I think we have got a responsibility to care about others who might not be doing as well as we are, form an opinion on topics and continuously question conditions, events and our own views. To do that we need information and to get information we need the media.
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