MEDIA CULTURE
It is imperative to foster conscious awareness among individuals, enabling them to engage in right thinking and critical analysis, so that they may arrive at correct opinions on their own.
In the contemporary age, ‘media culture’ is arguably the primary factor responsible for the corruption of people’s mindset.
A central feature of the modern media, be it print, electronic, or digital, is the method of one-sided reporting. Because most people obtain news from the media, on account of one-sided reporting in the media, they develop faulty opinions. They form their opinions on the basis of one-sided reporting.
One-sided reporting involves selecting bad news and ignoring good news. The media has the status of an industry. On account of this, it regards highlighting the bad news of any country or society as profitable while good news is not considered worthy of being reported. This behaviour of the media has made human thinking negative all across the world.
Consider an interesting and insightful example in this regard. I often listen to the broadcasts of BBC London. One day, I was listening to a programme on BBC London’s Hindi service. At the end of the programme, some letters were read out. One such letter was from a person based in Mauritius. In his letter, he complained that they broadcasted news from Hindi-speaking areas and that even though there were many Hindi-speaking people in Mauritius, they never gave any news of that country. The BBC announcer laughed, and replying to the sender of the letter, said, ‘Media is the name of reporting bad news. In your country, there is only good news, and for the media, good news is no news.’
It is against the system of Nature that there be only evil in the world and nothing else. The fact of the matter is that, in line with the system of Nature, in this world, if there is 1% evil, then, at the very same time, directly or indirectly, 99% good also exists. But the media never gives information to people about the fact that the evils that it reports are just 1% of the entire society and not the whole of it.
Prior to 1947, almost all the newspapers in the subcontinent would highlight only negative aspects of the British. The positive aspects of the British administration rarely found a place in their columns. And so, many people began to hate the British. Likewise, before 1947, newspapers that were influenced by the Muslim League used to ignore the positive aspects of the Hindus and published only negative things about them. The result of this was that many Muslims of the Indian subcontinent developed mistrust of Hindus. Similarly, these days, large sections of the Muslim media in many parts of the world do not refer to the positive aspects of America. As a result of this, many Muslims have developed an intense dislike for America and have even begun to imagine that America is the Enemy No. 1 of Muslims.
The status of the media is that of an industry. On account of the media’s own business expediencies, it is not possible for it to stop its method of one-sided reporting and follow a method of two-sided reporting. The practical solution in this regard is not complaining against the media, but, rather, reforming one’s own thinking. We need to promote conscious awareness among people. We need to nurture among them the ability to engage in right thinking and reflection so that they do not get affected by the faulty reporting of the media. By becoming capable of analysing things, themselves, they should be able to arrive at a proper opinion about them. An instance of the use of this method of analysis would be that if someone hears a Muslim leader claiming that America is the Enemy No. 1 of Islam or if someone reads such a claim in a Muslim newspaper, they should ask that if this claim were indeed true, how is it that more than six million Muslims are comfortably living in America (including even relatives of the Muslim leaders or writers who make such a wrong claim about America)? How is it, they must ask, that thousands of Islamic institutions have been established in America and are able to run freely? How is it that in America, grand religious gatherings take place the likes of which do not happen even in Muslim-majority countries?
If one engages in this sort of analysis of the claims of such Muslim media and Muslim leaders, the actual facts of the matter will come to light. In other words, we must not depend on the 1% news provided by the media, but, rather, along with it, should form a picture by also including the remaining 99% news. If one does this, one will save oneself from forming wrong and highly skewed opinions.
