Activism in the media

                                 Activism in the media 

 By Olga Rodríguez: Let's not be cynical. Journalism also does politics. There are fellow members and journalists who are more political than anything else, following to the letter the arguments of the party they represent, even proposed by a certain political group to give daily cane. 

 

 The media decide what to talk about and how to talk about what is talked about. And for several years some of them have inoculated poison through journalists who, out of the spotlight, presume that political representatives pass while they remain, without the need for anyone to vote for them at the polls or to exhaust their mandate. Faced with this poison, the presenter or presenter often neither refutes nor questions, and therefore, it remains, it becomes normal, it ceases to be scandalous.

 

 Too many channels have legitimized yelling formats in which falsehoods, misrepresentations, gestures of contempt to the interlocutor, and other more subtle but equally or more damaging issues, precisely because they are not so detectable: simplification, proposals of trivial topics that suppose a diversion of attention To the detriment of what is important, politicking against Politics, reductionism.

 

 Equidistance in the treatment of news that gives the same credibility to a statement and its opposite, to the aggressor and the victim, is daily. I often tell this hypothetical example: imagine that we are in World War II and we read in the press: “The rabbi of the Warsaw ghetto says that the Nazis are massacring the Jews. Goebbels denies it. Final point. Where is the reality here? Equidistance in the face of the abuse of human rights is not the intermediate point, it is a dangerous decision to take sides. We run the risk of reaching a time when we have to ask ourselves: How could it happen? Do we really still don't know the answer? 

 

 How could it happen, they wondered in Germany after the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. How could it happen, they wondered in Rwanda, after various media - and above all, Radio Mil Colinas, later condemned by the International Criminal Court for Rwanda - injected hatred into society through their daily messages. How could it happen, they wondered in the former Yugoslavia, where the media also played their part. How could it happen, they wondered in the US after years of institutionalized racism, with headlines, editorials and columns that justified the hatred of black people, the fight for civil rights, white supremacism. 

 

 How could it happen, they were also asked in the United States, when analyzing the adventures of Hitler and Mussolini. Several analysts concluded that even the American media had contributed to minimizing the impact that Hitler could have and to whitewashing Mussolini because he could stop the advance of the communist left. Ernest Hemingway and some others, such as The New Yorker newspaper, rejected the normalization of the Italian fascist leader, but many others were silent, neutral or even wrote with a positive tone about him.

 

 Noam Chomsky has mentioned on more than one occasion a study by the University of Massachusetts in which in the 1990s the positions of respondents who reported on television were analyzed. One of the questions they asked was: How many Vietnamese casualties do you estimate there were during the Vietnam War? «The average response was around 100,000. The official figures speak of two million victims and the real ones were probably three million or more, "says Chomsky, wondering what we would think of German political culture if when asked in that country how many Jews died in the Holocaust the average answer was that some 300,000. 

 

 Mass media power has a domain similar to that sustained by the Church in the Middle Ages. It is the elite that guides us, that lectures us, that wants to influence how we have to be and think, that creates consensus. Some media raise certain issues and bury others that are more urgent, they act as the chosen ones, as the only ones who know what is best for the people, whom Walter Lippman called the bewildered herd. The select group expects that herd to react as a mere stupid spectator, unable to understand for himself, abandoning participation and action, assuming without criticism the postulates that are offered to him. It doesn't take a lynx to know that if you are treated like a jerk on a daily basis, you have a higher risk of ending up thinking you are a jerk and acting like a jerk.

And so, in this way, we have reached this moment in which those who defend the welfare state are stigmatized or those who demand essential rights such as housing are called extremists. The suppression of rights and freedoms is perceived as the neutral position, as the correct one. In this Orwell newspeak they are calling for freedom to have a beer in a bar, while promoting tax policies that seriously hurt the majority and privilege a minority economically. There is no freedom without being able to make ends meet, without quality public services, without social justice. But what difference does that make? 

 Here journalists who practice their trade with a human rights perspective are being accused of being an activist, as if it were something terrible. The accusers are often people who exercise the most damaging of activisms: those who act in collusion with a certain power, even contributing to their dirty work, whitewashing abuses, legitimizing their messages, presenting them as the only valid source of information. There is the paradox that for some the journalist who makes human rights violations visible is the activist. The one who defends these abuses - silencing or normalizing them - is the neutral one, managing a single source of information: the official one. 

 How are we better informed? Watching gatherings that are pure shouting, following programs that poison, or analyzing the electoral programs of each political party? If we do the latter, we may discover that those who are presented as champions of freedom are the ones who most want to cut it off. And that those who are defined as the same devil may not be as bad as those who say, from their media thrones, are excited when they wave the baton believing that they can always lead the mob.

 There are journalists in this country who claim that they have never felt pressured or censored. They sure don't lie. They don't need to be pressured. The establishment armchairs are comfortable and comforting and also, they are the officially neutral ones. They are the good side of the story. The rest, activism.

 There are times when all indifference is criminal, Albert Camus wrote, and this is one of them. The unconsciousness that is in too many media can lead to enormous darkness. He's already doing it. But the cynics will say that how we get, that it is not so bad, that we are not so dramatic. How it shows that they do not receive the blows, nor discrimination, nor racism, nor precariousness, nor exclusion, nor do they know the consequences of injustice. They won't understand anything until it affects them. We are going to need much more education, more culture, more study, more knowledge of History, of the past, of Human Rights, of the importance of respect.

 Source: https://www.eldiario.es/opinion/zona-critica/activismo-medios-comunicacion_129_7798409.html#click=https://t.co/UnskgOAY2h