Our life today is controlled by media. Be it newspaper, television, radio or the internet, we depend on news for a lot of our day-to-day decisions and sometimes even blindly. This fact is well understood by Media companies, Governments and Businesses alike. Unfortunately, it is also being used actively to mislead the common man. News today is no more the simple raw information but it undergoes a complex process of editing and mixing before being delivered. Thinking over it for some time, i feel that the Media companies operate a huge mixer which continuously churns out news according to the following equation
NEWS = x% Information + y% Hype + z% Personal Biases + w% Political Biases
Different media companies use different values for x, y, z and w and yield different types of news. A case in point is the recent news about the bootup of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN. A channel called Aaj Tak in India ran a TV series which would have made a layman believe that the bootup of LHC would destroy the world. In this case, their percentage of hype was very high and little factual information was presented. Even if they would have done a simple google search for LHC and the myths surrounding LHC, they would have realized that speculations about formation of massive black holes have been long dismissed by emminent Scientists. But the media today is more interested in their own TRP ratings and very little interested in presenting facts.
3 comments:
Glad you realized soon that media and news is nothing more than nicely packaged shit! The process is very aptly coined in 1984, by George Orwell as Thought Policing.
Glad that someone shares my views about media :) Media has lost its purpose these days, and no matter how HARD I try, I can't get myself hooked onto news. Though some news are good and genuine, effort into finding a needle in shit is not an easy job!
I am sorry but i will disagree with your conclusion and i absolutely do NOT share that conclusion with you :). Firstly, the point of my article was to highlight an opinion and not to state a fact. Secondly, keeping uptodate with the news is an absolute essential and there are no excuses for that. Remember that the equation contains a term for "Information" which means that every news item carries some amount of truth. What the equation tells us is that opinions made by media are not necessarily facts and one should keep this in mind when reading news.
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