Structure of Manipulated News (Part:1)
Noor Majid of DOT: Modern news media and journalism took its earliest form during the 17th century, but the inception of news distribution is far more ancient. Actually, its association dates back to the earliest human civilizations, even in the Stone Age’s when human used to live on caves in groups and hunt animals for survival. The element of news was crucial for their survival, before leaving for a hunt they used to send recon teams which gathered information on the movements of animal herds and possible dangers in the surrounding area. This function of news still exists and embedded as one of the main elements in modern news organizations. Surveillance is the term which describes this function of media. Modern media outlets use surveillance to aware the society about possible dangers or opportunities on different aspects. Besides this entertainment, educating the society and spreading knowledge are other essential elements of an ideal media organization. News media has to deliver this kind of services besides providing everyday news to the general reader. However, in the last two decades, modern media has entered another era. The dissolution of Soviet Union, end of Cold War and increasing usage of information technology in daily life vastly contributed to this development. Now readers can get their preferred story delivered to their smartphones and laptops. Thereby, based on cultural orientation and differentiation is also creating new kind of selective readership of news. Though the age of globalization and free market economy dominated world order has started a new era of serving partial truth, according to their reader’s preference and their propaganda objective. Media researchers like Edward Hermann, Noam Chomsky and Norman Feinstein described this era as Post Truth Era, because most of the times partial truth makes people less interested in discovering the real truths on the ground. Such kind of news publication has many times challenged the ethics of the conventional news organizations.
Now the literate and aware individuals in the West have lost their faith on traditional mass media. People cannot be blamed for their growing distrust because its seeds are sowed by both new and the conventional mass media. The nature of post truth era is thus a new kind of ‘Yellow Journalism’, which is farthest from the truth.