Media Justice
Hello my kats and kittens! It has once again been a while
since I last posted a truly profound blog (and profound is just my way of thinking that I'm important to you and you view me with respect) about anything that flitters through
my mind at that particular time. This post is a little bit different and it has
weighed heavily on my mind for weeks. Please bear with me if I ramble.
It should come as no shocker that I am a fan of writing. I
love it in any form. Meme’s, texts, emails, blogs and articles. It is a
fantastic medium and a bastion of communication. However…I’m truly jaded by the
media. In any form.
Let me explain and then I will get into the nitty gritty of
our conversation. We are having a conversation, right? You with me? Good.
In my lifetime to date I have witnessed the death of true journalism.
Journalism itself is a truly remarkable thing to read about and I have
graciously provided you a link so you might peruse it yourself. The start of journalism, and the subsequent
evolution into realism, was to create a medium of communicating facts,
verifying these facts and using objective methods. The problem that revealed
itself over time was that writers will always be biased in some form. It is
human nature.
The problem I have with media today is the demise of any
form of objectivity and the birth of “sensationalist journalism.” Wading
through articles, even accredited news reports and not simply the fly by night
websites, is that bias has completely overtaken journalism. If I were to point
out one specific nature of these hostile takeovers is the use of adjectives,
adverbs and pronouns.
So far in this blog I have intentionally used certain words
to lead you towards a feeling. And that feeling, that I have hopefully
accomplished, is that of a gloom cast over media.
You should know me by now so it should come as no real shock
that I am targeting a few specific examples of truly biased media reporting
that has made complicated situations even more difficult to have enough
information and simple facts.
I’ve purposely steered clear of posting anything to do with
the Ferguson case. It is a complicated, convoluted and twisted example of a
situation where wording can change the entire light of a very divided issue.
I don’t know if Wilson acted in self defense. I don’t know
if Brown was innocent of struggling or assaulting a police officer. As a
thinking adult I should have an opinion about the case. When racial inequality,
or a controversial death, issues are presented then you MUST find an opinion about
at least some aspect of the case. It is imperative that you do because that is
where we begin open dialogue to make positive changes to our society.
My problem with finding that middle ground so I can begin
forming a cohesive opinion is that the adjectives, adverbs and pronouns thrown
around by “journalists” are simply thrown in to make readers, listeners or
watchers completely biased.
Let me provide you with an example:
The child was murdered in an
unprovoked attack. The white police officer gunned down the black teenager as he tried to comply with the
officers demands.
Now let’s look at a different example:
Officer Wilson found himself in a
life and death struggle as the suspect, after resisting arrest, reached into
the officer’s vehicle in a bid to grab the officer’s weapon.
See the power of wording? It dramatically changes how you
and I react to the statements. The words are leading us towards a dramatically
unbiased opinion. And that is my problem with the entire racially charged
issues where a death has occurred.
I don’t know what happened during that struggle and the
subsequent loss of a life. You don’t know it either because we were not there
and there has been no article or televised discussion where it has not become a
racially divided issue.
Sensationalist journalism has become the norm. Is the
Ferguson case a racial case or is it an unprovoked attack (on either party)? It
is both. It is a tragic affair that has people of all the colors of the rainbow
finding facts that one color racially profiles and suppresses the rights of
another color. And that is wrong on so many levels. When we keep labeling
ourselves then we can’t identify with others of different identities. We, as a
society, have largely lost empathy for others due to a lack of unbiased facts.
Look. I’ve seen so many statistics thrown up on social media,
which I know is ironic since I am using social media as a platform for my own view,
that twists and turns racially charged incidents and thoughts into a miasma of
dividing based on skin color.
What saddens me the most in the current race wars is that we
are not making changes in our way of thinking because we are being lead without
really examining why we think the way we do. Yes. I know that there are people
who claim to see right through the issue into the heart of the matter. But you
don’t. I don’t. I want to truly think that as a rational adult I can view a
situation without placing a “color” on it and thinking more as a humanitarian
but I find myself grappling back into the labeling of a person.
“This will be the day
when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, "My
country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my
fathers died, land of the Pilgrims' pride, from every mountainside, let freedom
ring."…” And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we
let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every
city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black
men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able
to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at
last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"”
That is one of the greatest speeches ever written. It is a
speech of oppression that leads into the promise that through peaceful
demonstration and education, all men (women) will one day be equal in the
sights of others.
We can’t do that yet. But I have hope that we one day can
throw aside the adjectives, adverbs and general labels that are attached to
each and every one of us. Describing our physical looks to another isn’t
racism. Racism is judging the character of a man without unbiased information.
Racism is denying another person life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
through equality, empathy and understanding.
I’m not naïve. I know that there will always be a dividing
line between individuals based on something. But you know what? I can hope. I
can try to do my part by showing my daughters that we need to focus on facts
and ignore sensationalism.
So I leave you, my dear friends, with my solution. Educate
the next generation because we are already biased whether we want to believe it
or not. We must force ourselves to leave that bias behind as we teach our
children to look past skin color, income level, sex and religion. We must teach
our children and future generations to look beyond the past and learn to ignore
labeling so that true equality can be gained. We must find some way to set
aside our differences so we can become a society of uniqueness and empathy for
all humankind. Then we can cry out, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God
Almighty (or whatever you believe in), we are free at last!”
