In the new media world, all of us must take much more responsibility and become our own editors
The story of India’s Daughter, the BBC documentary on rape, flooded all prime time news channels in India last week and went viral on social media. The hullabaloo was about three issues. First, what did the documentary say to us about what we are as a society? Second, should the government ban the airing of the film because it would tarnish India’s image abroad? This seemed futile because the Indian government could not stop people outside India from viewing the film. Besides, with the ubiquity and speed of social media, even Indians were able to view the film. The third issue was, what are the responsibilities of the media in such situations? The media has great power to direct our collective attention, to shape our views about others, and about what is right and wrong.
Digitized information and Internet-enabled communication are changing the shape of the media. Printed newspapers and TV news are no longer the only channels through which people receive news. We are bombarded with information and opinions, in flashes and tweets from everywhere. This torrent has two consequences. One is that purveyors of news and information have to compete much harder with each other to be noticed. This has created a media style of attention-grabbing headlines and a desire to shock to get attention.
The other consequence is that we must make choices about what we will pay attention to since we cannot absorb it all, and about what we will believe. We instinctively choose what is most popular, and follow the most followed. We are offered surveys of what others believe—how many think Mr X was right to do what he did—to help us make up our minds. Cinema and sports celebrities become the people we are expected to trust for what is best for us—the toothpaste we should use, the car we should drive, and the bank we should put our savings with.
Myths can be created in the media. Their construction is guided by an invisible hand, especially when there are no editors accountable to us to sift through information and opinions for us. But even editors and news anchors in old style media must go with the tide to be noticed. They too are tempted to tell us what is shocking, or what everyone is saying. They say they must tell us what we want to hear, and in the way we like to hear it, or we will not give them our attention. Modern society is caught in a vicious circle. Media tells us what it thinks we will pay attention to, and we notice only what is thrust on us. Thus, we may not get to the truth.
I may illustrate the problem of journalists giving readers information in the way they are used to by the dilemmas of business journalism. Many times, researchers looking into the stories of business turnarounds have found many facets to the story and many heroes far from the C-suite. However, they feel compelled to make the chief executive officer (CEO) the colossus of the story. It’s because people like to read stories about big leaders: they are the stories that sell. When companies are big advertisers too, it does the journalists’ organization no harm to lionize the CEO. Perversely though, it can do the company harm. In a survey a few years ago, a Dutch think tank found a striking correlation between the frequency with which the CEO of a firm appeared (favourably) on the covers of business journals and the decline in the fortunes of the firm soon thereafter. Not only was society not told the whole story, the CEOs had believed their own press.
Another example is the myth of the 100 days during which great leaders make reforms or fail to make them at all. Alain de Botton writes in his book, The News: A User’s Manual, “The most significant fact of political life, which almost no news organization dare to acknowledge—because it would at a stroke exclude half its speculations and disappointments—is that in some key areas of politics, nothing can be achieved very quickly by one person or one party; it would be impossible for anyone to change matters at a pace that would flatter the expectations of the news cycle." The media thirsts for big-bang reforms because they will make big news. Myriad small reforms that add up into big shifts in society are not newsable.
We must become better citizens of the world, and take more responsibility for the commons and the public good. India’s Daughter reveals a sickness in the mind of the rapist and a sickness in society too. In his book, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-First Century, educationist and author Howard Gardner highlights how education of the youth must change in the new Internet-driven media world. When information is flooding them on their smartphones and celebrities are becoming popular guides, they will have to learn how to dive deep to find the truth and how they must introspect to make ethical choices. In this new media and information world, we must take much more responsibility to find the truth for ourselves, to go below the headlines and read the whole story, and look for less publicized and less popular views too. In the new media world all of us have to become our own editors.
https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/rUkWPaeOxojZiChR7SUAYK/Getting-to-the-truth-about-ourselves.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">This blog post appeared on livemint on March 8, 2015.