After reading Russ Kick’s article Hugo Chavez is Crazy, I had a number of questions running through my mind. The News is a medium which in general people consider to be laden with facts about what goes on in the world around us. We need the news to deliver to us an accurate account of what is happening around the globe. I was very frustrated to realize that Kick was right, frustrated in the sense that I have fallen into the same trap as every other person who likes to keep abreast of world events, the trap of deception. No one likes to be deceived, therefore we all just bury our heads in the sand and like the good cogs in the machine we are, we just believe everything that the media feeds us. The News is the deepest betrayer of the publics trust yet end up being the most praised for it. I have many times heard people say that they don’t watch the news because it’s ”too depressing”. This is true, and it is true because we have conditioned ourselves as a society to react to negative events. The news has such an immense opportunity to mislead and misrepresent what really happened in order to make it ”easy to discredit (Kick)” people and create this element of negativity that people are so horrifyingly drawn to. People see what they want to see and will react accordingly to what they have been programmed to react to. This deception will continue, that’s the nature of the beast in terms of the news, the one with the best story gets the highest ratings and therefore are seen as the most credible, this is where the frustration comes in. Who is telling the truth? Who is a reliable source? In reality we can’t know everything that is going on in every country with a total degree of accuracy, but we can at least demand some level of unbiased journalism. “If you want to get accurate news in the United States, you might want to learn a language other than English(Kick).” Kick does mention that Canadian news is more accurate than US news, and as a Canadian who is very concerned with our countries continually rising “Americanization”, I am very apt to agree with Kick on this point. i guess that we will have to start relying more and more on the news reported by real people on line.
I find it amazing that everything in our social world can be traced back to the theories of Karl Marx. The interest of the dominant class has always been represented in the News and it continues to be that way. The inequalities within the class structures in our society stem from Marx and are applicable in relating the accuracy of the News delivered to people not just in north America but around the world. Capitalist interests prevail and set the stage for a very dismal future when we are faced with decisions that affect our nation in terms of what we actually know. The oppressed do not have a voice because of their subordiante position and therefore in fact they just do not care. As more people get to the point that they find the News to be nothing more than fabrication to benefit the dominant classes, unless they are a part of that class they will continue to not care because in reality they have their own despair to worry about. On the flip side, those who do buy into the reports they are handed by the News are more likely to be the ones who are the most ignorant as to the state the world is in.
