What exactly is the news?

The local ones focused for the first ten minutes on whatever mundane thing the powerful people of Nigeria had thought was wise to do on that day. We knew their faults – the local news channels.  Many times, this focus on the excellencies would be at the expense of a disaster that had befallen the […]

The local ones focused for the first ten minutes on whatever mundane thing the powerful people of Nigeria had thought was wise to do on that day. We knew their faults – the local news channels.  Many times, this focus on the excellencies would be at the expense of a disaster that had befallen the common man, which needed to be reported but were callously ignored.

But never ignored by the foreign news channels, who it would seem have made staple meals out of the smorgasbord of bad news that stream out of ‘less developed countries’. They never are tired of reporting those, and we are never tired of churning out the bad news as well. It has now got to a point where the bad news are no longer reported for the professional essence of informing viewers what was happening around the world, but to psychologically subjugate those billions of people who are from less fortunate countries, and to give some false sense of importance, even to the most wretched person in their own country.  A man sleeping on the kerb in New York, therefore believes he is better off and superior to anyone in Africa.  And an African, a Nigerian more precisely, shrinks in horror as he sits in the lobby of an important company, waiting for an interview and the news channels begin their drivel on the half hour…
“The dreaded sect Boko Haram has just killed 278 young girls in the northern city of… in Nigeria.  A Nigerian fraudster just defrauded the UK educational system of Four Million Pounds, setting the record for the highest fraud in the UK educational sector in history”.
The Nigerian hopes no one will ask him where he is from in the interview, or if he was a citizen of these fortunate western countries, he hopes no one will ask him how come his funny accent or decode him straight away. Even among countries less fortunate, there are discriminations. It’s far sexier to say you are Ghanaian or Gambian these days in many parts of the earth. Nigerian?  Red flag!
But that is not my concern today. My concern is to ask the question; what exactly is the NEWS?  Let us try and define the NEWS. Some say the idea came from North, East, West and South; as in telling you what has happened that is relevant in all the cardinal points of the compass. Some say it is about telling you what is NEW and relevant to the populace.  Of late though, NEWS have evolved. Somehow, the standard format settled on repeating the same thing every 30 minutes; as if to drill the information into your brains. Many false items have been repeated so frequently, Goebbellian-style, until they became received wisdom. They became the news.  Many news items have been manufactured by editors, inside studios, or from the posh living rooms of entrepreneurs who own the news channels, or by governments, standing over and in cahoots with so called journalism professionals.  A discerning mind finds out it is tough to know what to believe these days.
My position on the news was further enamoured when I read Michael Lewis’ book, Fooled By Randomness. Like me, he too stopped watching the news avidly – like decades ago. There is just to point. Like him, I have found out, especially in these days of social media, that whatever was terribly important, must filter through the junk and can be found by scrolling down your facebook page and seeing what your friends were commenting about. 100 friends will comment about all sorts of things that are happening and that they deem important to them. Given 100 friends, one or two will comment about something that you deemed most important at that moment. They may be wrong or right. Yours is to investigate further. It costs almost nothing. This process is scientific. It is much better than buying sheaves of newspapers and spending hours leafing through them reading the fine print. Many young people I know no longer care about the printed newspapers.
But there’s even more sinister stuff about the news.
There seems to be a deliberate cold war – or better put, information war – going on. Somehow we don’t know we are in the middle of the war. Sometimes we are at the forefront; on ground zero. Sometimes we are dropped in like paratroopers. As the news gets concocted and cooked, as the news get selected and preselected for us by the powerful media houses, and powerful bloggers, sometimes deliberately and sometimes just by sleight of hand, our minds get made up for us. Our mental faculties get manipulated in the way the witting or unwitting puppet master wishes it to be.  What we think we “know”, what we see, what we hear, then becomes our destiny.
Here am I, sitting in my room in a three star hotel in an Asian country, watching PressTV. And it would seem that this channel lives in a different world from the world of CNN. Both – or all – of them have learnt the intricate fine art of superb presentation. The studios are a sight to behold. The beautiful anchors are captivating.  The men are models for GQ. The women beauty queens. You just cannot but be enraptured. And it seems beauty makes people believable.
This time, PressTV, owned by Iran, covers everything that the CNN/BBC/FOX/MSNBC/NBC circuit REFUSES to cover. I hear for the first time that citizens of Washington DC in the USA are refused the vote. DC is a Federal Territory so people there don’t vote. I see the frequency of unprovoked gun murders in the USA. They switch over to the UK. There is a report that spells even more doom for the UK economy. It slumped again. They go on the streets. People are complaining bitterly about the taxes. Jobs are being cut. More families than every are now in abject food poverty. BBC would never cover that. The rest of Europe, says PressTV, and its counterpart, Russian-owned RTV, isn’t faring much better.
On their part, the CNN/FOX circuit focuses strongly on all the wars going on elsewhere but at home. A visitor from Mars would just make up its mind, watching any of them for five minutes, that all the savages lived in Asia, Africa and especially Muslim countries.  These news channels have managed to divide the world into a good Western Europe, America, Singapore, Australia and anywhere the Euro-American has interest, and a bad SouthEast Asia, Middle East, and mostly anywhere Islam has a strong influence. Throw into the equation, a retarded Africa, where all its people take all the wrong decisions and have no redemption, to complete the picture.  Someone posted the other day, what they thought were the words of a sage “Muslims hate their country, they love America, but they want to convert us all into Islam”. No one bothered to interrogate the statement for truism. No one bothered to do any short sojourn into history to find out the corrosive influences of the west which may have led to Muslims – and Africans – desertingtheir countries. No one asked for a second if it was a strategy working against these unfortunate people, which they cannot defeat except the respond, strategically.
Why? Because we understand, we actually stand ‘under’ whatever has been presented to us as the news. What really is the news? And who do we trust now?