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Forget those gorish and upsetting videos on YouTube of Nigerians setting potato thieves on fire, just visit the front page of your nearest ‘THE INDEPENDENT’ and watch a lunch mob in action, 21st-century style!
WARNING: This article is a rant and contains emotive language. Reader discretion is advised!
Can someone describe to me what is the difference in barbarity between a hoard of Africans lynching and setting alight an accused person without trial, and the western media lynching and setting fire to the image and reputation of an accused person before court proceedings determining guilt or innocence had concluded?
There is no difference for those of us that still use our brains, but this ‘trial by media,’ or rather, ‘lynching by media,’ is fast becoming the new way that ASSUMED perpetrators have to be dealt with. There is simply no better system in place than a bunch of speculating, opinionated journalists deciding which person or company is evil and deserves the ‘Get ‘em!’ treatment.
Have you people of the press no shame, or are you all buying your degrees in journalism? Have you forgotten that to be unbiased is the fundamental ethical foundation of the Journalism profession as is the Hippocratic Oath to the Medical profession?
You cannot claim ignorance of this, nor call yourself a qualified professional if you forego the basic instructions of your field. You can also not claim ignorance of the law, the courts, judges, and juries who are much more capable of assessing the details and facts (not that you lot care for facts anymore, sensation is what you are really after) and determining guilt or innocence.
As an engineer, I cannot wake up tomorrow and rebel against the crucial importance of mathematics in engineering (the closest thing to ethics we who avoided humanities subjects have). Doing so would—or should—eject me from whatever position I hold as a result of my qualifications.
Maybe it is because engineering is, first of all, devoid of ethics that we are now the only profession of applied knowledge making advances, while the more traditional professions (journalism, politics, medicine, psychology, etc.) are collapsing under political correctness spouted by liberals and echoed by the zombie hoards that listen to them.
The case that triggered me to spill ink on this subject is the ongoing furor in America over a white police officer that emptied a clip into a black teenager AKA the 'Michael Brown Shooting.'
The media released the name and address of the officer, because it had by its own mechanisms decided he is guilty of racially-motivated murder.
I won’t go into that story much beyond that initial detail (you can look it up online yourself), because an equally unjustified one is still ongoing right there in that former country of mine, South Africa.
Oscar Pistorius has already been found guilty by the media, and one can plainly see this in practically every publication they make about the man. Everything he does is somehow woven into this ‘egomaniacal monster’ image that the media has plastered him with.
I know nothing about Oscar’s guilt or innocence, and I await the court’s judgment on the matter—as any educated, law-abiding person does (but there are so few of us).
The media, despite its clear efforts to do so, could not persuade me away from my neutral position on the matter.
But the media doesn’t care to convince people like me (I’m not stupid enough); it only cares to convince the volatile masses who believe everything they read in a newspaper/online or see on television, and then go rampaging as if possessed by devils—which, of course, makes the media the general for a new mindless force that can be command into action with just a few cleverly-crafted headlines and carefully-placed insinuations. We know nobody cares about facts anymore; assumption will do, just as it was the preferred method of scrutiny during the Dark Ages (which the west is allowing itself to be dragged back into).
The wheels really are coming off Western Civilization. In more cerebrally-empowered regions of the world (Asia, for example) we simply don’t have this sort of dramatized, skewed news that Western Media spouts every hour, and I’m sure it has to do with the fact that everyone here actually earns their qualifications!
I don’t know how to impart the understanding on the common man that most of what you will ever read online, see on television, or peruse in your weekly paper is UTTER NONSENSE!
Western Media has become like participants in that stupid game where you whisper things in the next participant’s ear and once it reaches the end of the line, nothing of the original message remains.
This is exactly how many news sites get hold of and contort a story. Why do you think they are all plastering their publications with shutterstock photos? It is because they don’t have eyes, ears, and cameras on the ground anymore. It’s much easier to paraphrase what some other news outlet published, and add in the necessary ‘corrections’ to assign blame where it seems most likely to fit.
Let me further illustrate this. I can write on my Facebook page that I live on the moon, but any conscious person would suspect the idea that there is a public commentator writing for News24’s My News section who is living on the moon.
I know I am getting elementary here, but this is the level to which you have to explain things, or some of them just tilt their heads like a dog looking at an answering machine going off.
More than you, the reader, I the writer, am exponentially more embarrassed, ashamed, and offended that I have to address adult members of my own species at the same level I would human infants, but clearly some people never cognitively made it past kindergarten. If they did, Western Media would not be able to stay in business with the stupid nonsense they spout.
After all, you can’t sell crap to people who smell it before you even can present it, and in that case, Western Media simply represents the cranial rot sweeping the populace, which has become the norm in the West. This is what welfare states produce, and the West is now almost exclusively a Welfare conglomerate where a capable few must support scores … scores of brainless, uneducated, underperforming persons who have nothing better to do than getting riled by the latest headlines.
But enough of that.
Western Media also dominates much of the news and speculations and vitriol sliming the internet, and then there are those internet-born fads doing the rounds.
The latest digital famine is spreading under the name ‘The Ice-Bucket Challenge’—which has scores of people now ritualistically having themselves dunked with a bucket of ice water, and rising after it, clenched fists cast towards the heavens, as if they have just won the lottery. Wow! You’d swear this is a new invention, but I did this stuff as a child and got bored of it at that age!
But there is a reason why people do this nonsense: It gives them an artificial sense of achievement. People who simply persist on welfare and legislated advantage have no reason to challenge themselves, so the latest dare offers them a chance to feel like they are part of something bigger and as if having achieved a great feat by overcoming the miniscule obstacles the dare presented them with. Thus things like Gangnam style (which I’ve never seen and never will), chubby bunny (shoving your cheeks with marshmallows and saying ‘chubby bunny’), and the tabasco drinking challenge all have their viral appeal.
I suggest an amendment to the ice-bucket challenge: Rather than dousing yourselves with the bucket of chilly water, why not hold each other’s heads in it for 20 minutes at a time. Now that would be worth watching! And as with any other fad, like lemmings people jump off the cliff en masse.
In much the same vein, Mike Chang’s ‘One WEIRD/EVIL/SHOCKING trick to get 6-pack abs!’ ad has taken over the internet! Because there are Homo Sapient foolish enough to click on any provocative title, not knowing it’s a trap! Who still falls for such bland marketing tactics?
Even on YouTube one gets bombarded with Mike Chang’s “DO YOU know which muscle you need to work to get rock hard…” [Clicked ‘Skip this Ad’]. Yes, Mike, I do which muscle, … my DICK—a muscle you don’t have and should not be talking about!
I still too young to be accused of simply getting old. Society, at large, is simply getting dumber!
Damn the information age! And damn the internet!
Two things the experts swore would mean great things for our civilization! And yet here we are, with the Homo Sapien species so dumbed down that we might as well make wearing diapers and sucking on pacifiers THE LAW!
Thank god Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome did not invent the information age and the internet, because by now we would already be back in the caves, destined to crawl up the trees again in the near future.
I’ll admit to defeat in a peripheral struggle and concede that we should finally give in to Creationist demands that we stop classifying ourselves as primates, lest we make all other primate species look stupid!
