I remember my second year communications course professor telling us that the concentration of media control in the hands of a few very rich people was very dangerous to our democracy and to your society.
It now seems like such a simple and naïve time back in 1980. And boy was she ever right. In my lifetime I have watched in horror as the worldwide sources of our information and news has become completely owned and dominated by a very few bad faith actors. An outcome of this is the manipulation of language and the subsequent bias in our major media sources.
Al Jezeera wrote a brilliant article about this bias of language. As the author pointed out, our major media sources use completely different language when describing two very similar sets of facts. For example, our Western media would say, “Corrupt third world politicians pocket bribes to fund election war chests and personal gain.”
Meanwhile here at home “MPs/senators work with lobbyists/superpacs who have donated to their campaigns in order to advocate for their interests.”
Our democracies in the West, perhaps most glaringly in the U.S., are as corrupt as any in the developing world. But we certainly don’t describe it that way! It is this selective language and bias that is now endemic in our entertainment-focused media. And it clearly contributes to the divisions in our society now.
We can’t agree on facts to even begin to have a conversation. I don’t believe our media outlets used to do this. They reported the facts without the biased language. Their opinion bias was not cloaked in the language.
Sure they had a perspective but if you read an article on the same topic from the New York Times and then one from the Wall St. Journal, the articles would be more or less the same. We got the facts and then the pundits weighed in with their interpretation of those facts. But at least we agreed on a baseline. The reporter’s job was to provide understanding and context, not sway opinions.
I submit that now, that is almost impossible to find. Both the left and the right media cannot help themselves from adding their “perspective bias” when reporting on the facts. As a result, multiple studies show that democracy is in trouble around the globe.
It is in serious retreat. According to a study done on 167 countries, the Democracy Index for 2019 found that democratic backsliding across the world has led to the worst score since the index was first produced in 2006, with only 5.7 per cent of the global population living in what could be considered a “full democracy.” Hey folks, we are a complete minority here and fighting for our lives to continue in a free society.
Clearly, we cannot have functioning democracies without an independent, accurate, unbiased media to inform us and help us understand the world around us. Without it, in the not too distant future, our democracies will be shredded, distorted facsimiles of what they once were. And the world will be a much more dangerous and scary place as a result.
“The burgeoning threat to democracy and the allure of the siren song of authoritarianism are demonstrating that ‘descriptive journalism’ is incapable of explaining to the disinformed a world that is becoming more and more complex” [said] Business Week.
The failure of our media and our government leaders to manage this pandemic is a case in point on how bad it can get.
The demonization of differing opinions, the shouting down of people who disagree, the vicious characterization of people who don’t see it the way you do, the hyperbole of fear, the mismanagement, the lack of clarity in policy, the politicization of the entire thing ... well, there is no room in a functioning society for this kind of polarization. We needed clear-eyed communication and policy throughout that would bring us together as a community to understand.
Hiding behind your Facebook name, lobbing grenades and criticisms on anyone and everyone who doesn’t see the world exactly as you do, is nothing more than cowardice and ignorance fuelled by a very poorly functioning media stream of half truths, censorship and selective interpretation.
We each need to take responsibility in this fight for our democracies, which means each as an individual needs to resist the knee-jerk response to someone who is questioning our position, our facts, our invested opinion.
If you give a damn about finding the truth, then, when “your truth” is being questioned, reach out to the questioner and talk to them to understand why they believe what they do.
Yelling at them and calling them “a threat to us all” will only speed up the decline of civility in our society, reduce our freedoms and carry us further down the road to an ugly place that I don’t think anyone of us wants to go to.
We really are in trouble...
Jayson Faulkner // Whistler
