Saturday, May 21, 2005

Media Power - part 2

My shoulder is not completely well yet but I decided to finish this so continuing from the previous part:
He told me that people of the world had two completely different views of Iran before and after revolution which both was wrong. He had visited Europe before revolution when he was just a little boy. In Germany, they had asked him if they have an oil well in their house in Iran. The irony was they were a rather poor family. That was what media was showing from Iran: a country of one thousand and one nights with people having oil wells inside their houses and everyone living happily ever after. But that was as always just an extremely simplified and untrue image of a country which like every other country had many different layers and when suddenly one of these layers came to explode in 1979 everyone was shocked because that wasn't what the world was thinking that a people of such a country might do.
After that, several big errors from both sides made everyone in the world against a country which once a lot of people admired it. And the natural outcome was the 180 degree turn of media in the image they were showing of this evil country with everyone mad in it. And as always they are still not right. They always filter the news they are going to show and they always show everything on the basis of what they think previously about it. So in an area where there shouldn't be any feelings allowed in decisions, in lower layers of their work we can easily see that they prejudge the subject of their work. And what is the result? Everyone in the world is ignorant about the other parts of the world and unfortunately everyone is suspicious to the others. And this makes us the center of many misjudgments. It is really hard to be born in two very unfortunate categories: Muslim and Iranian.
And if you search the web for these two the most probable words you'll find are "terrorist", "axis of evil" and "hostages".

2 comments:

KL said...

Oops! I didin't see you blog for a long, and so left a comment on your previous post but then after i come back to your page, I see this new post :).

Yeah! you and your friend - both are right. People have lots of stereotype images about Muslims and Middle-East.

But then people all over the world have lots of stereotype images about other countries. For example, people from UAE/Saudi Arabia, etc, have lots of stereotype images about Israel.
Similarly people have lots of stereotype images or India.

But the world is getting pretty merge with the movement of people all across the globe. Also, blogging/internet, etc. are also helping. So, hopefully 100 years down the line things will be better.

I've lots of ideas about all these, but can't do so in a comment space.

Anonymous said...

وب لاگ خوبی داری. مطلب جالبی بود. قدرت رسانه های همگانی به حدیست که جهان را دچار آشوب کنونی نموده اند.
پولاد همایونی
http://siprisk.blogspot.com