Precis Final

Précis

The media’s job is to produce news, unbiased and truthful and put it into the hands of their audience. We expect that some do this more than others, which “respected” newspapers such as the Guardian, the independent and the Observer is more honest than others. But exactly what are we basing this judgment on? We base this on nothing that has some real validity, but just that it’s an up-market newspaper. In this book, David Edwards and David Cromwell speak of the surprisingly many points in which the media has failed to meet their promises to their audience, having instead turned to exploitation of their loyal readers.
The first examples they use are those of the government. In the UK, the government owns the large TV station BBC. You would think that this would just be good as it would work in the interest of the country, but that is not the case. Seeing as politicians face elections every 4 years, they will use the media for propaganda, in order to give them a head start for the next year’s elections, but unfortunately, that is not all. The government will use the control over the media to either promote war, or disguise their ethically questionable actions. In the invasion of Iraq is just one example of this. When Tony Blair first announced that Britain would take part in the invasion, he used reasons such as ‘Saving and liberating the people’ and ‘Ending Starvation’, however the official reason was that the Iraqi was too armed, and this was an invasion to disarm them – or so that BBC said; however, they failed to mention that in the previous year this had already happened in a more peaceful manner. The US and the UK had indeed already done this, taking 95% of all Iraqi weapons. There was absolutely nothing about this in the newspapers, all they spoke of was about this ‘disarmament’ that was about to happen, trouble was that there no weapons to take. It does not take long to realize the true intentions of this invasion: Oil. And despite Blair’s predictions, the completely opposite happened: School, hospitals and infrastructure was destroyed in the bomb showers, leaving the Iraqis to starve. Strangely enough, this was not mentioned in the newspapers – the starvation was, but not the root of the problem. The UK government, having control over the media then blamed this famine on.
In order to control this, the government will have to control one person at the newspaper: the editor. Not a single article gets published without sifting through the editor’s brain. And he’s the one who works for the corporations/government. You could also refer to the government as the corporations, seeing as in the world today, the governments are largely dependent on these corporations for funding, and so whatever the government does is in the general interest of the corporations. The editor has every incentive to do his job well, because if he does so, he will become the highest paid person at the office, and if he does it incorrectly, he will get sacked. So in other words, everything published will have been filtered by a corporate editor, who would not want anything bad being written about his firm, so he cuts it out, or adds a more controversial topic close to this, completely obliterating it in importance. This is known as misdirection, where the attention is being taken off the original area of importance, and onto something seemingly more important. This is also known as normalizing the unthinkable, which is where the newspapers, in the process of making a story more understandable, adds a certain amount of doubt to the story, if the story would have otherwise been displaying a too severe corporate crime.
The owners of these businesses do not consist of greedy, fat republicans, but in many cases fathers and mothers who care about the world they live in as well. Their dilemma; however, is to work in the interest of the shareholders and maximize their profit. This is of course a common misconception, but although this statement makes them seem innocent, do we just let them go?
In the past 20 years, the media has been overshadowing the greatest threat to humanity of all time. It all started with a great change in 1988, when scientists suddenly realized what was going on. People were already dying from strange natural disasters, and people were already starting to blame it all on the excessive CO2 emissions of the globe. Although people knew the big corporations were to blame, no one bothered asking what the motives were for firms to oppose the reality of this climate change. And soon the media began to blame it on American and China as a whole. NAM, a gathering of over 3 million of the world's biggest firms opposed the climate change, significantly. But what is even more significant is that the Independent and the Guardian never mentioned it in their newspapers.

So what is happening now, is that the media has drowsed something that shouldn’t have been, since it can led to the very extinction of human kind if we do not react fast enough. Actions that should already have been dealt with are being postponed, because of current economic interests. A wise man said ‘We are short-run creatures living in a long-run world’ and if the media continues to shrink the awareness, we will run ourselves into our graves.