The first casualty of war is the truth, said Arthur Ponsonby in 1928, in his book ‘Falsehood in Wartime’. Searching to understand the truth about what is happening amongst all the reports and commentators about the so called ‘War on Terror’ is a difficult job. Each reporter, each commentator, each politician and each news outlet has their own biases and interests, which causes them to make some assumptions.
The role of the media and politicians should be to protect their populations, promote justice and human rights, and to seek the truth about terrorist attacks in as objective a manner as possible. However, today most politicians and channels seem limited in their ability to do this, being dependent upon funding from one source or another and bound by the laws of a particular place. Money seems to influence politics in various liberal societies, calling into question how real democracy, i e representation of, and a voice for all the people can be possible. It seems that today the less than 1 percent with most of the power and money are often just trying to find any means to hold onto and increase their monopoly of influence.
One thing is for certain: generalisations made about any group of people are going to be inaccurate and unjust. Against all media ethics should be the use of the media for propaganda purposes — to generalise in a very opinionated way in order to spread amongst the public a feeling of superiority, mistrust, suspicion, then fear and panic about a particular group or groups of human beings. This process also involves demonisation of a group of people and hence incitement of violence against them, based on a few selected ‘facts’ from history, much suspicion, and sometimes blatant lies. (Courtesy of The Peninsula Qatar)
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