The individual needs knowledge in order to be able to build his vision of the world, determine his position in it, and realize how to act and achieve success. its progress.
The question that every individual can ask himself: What do I know about the world? And the answer that you can reach is that your knowledge is limited and does not enable you to issue correct judgments or formulate an opinion on a global issue.
And because a person is an enemy of what he is ignorant of, he can respond to the campaigns launched by the parties that control the media against (or in favor of) any person, idea, or country, thus shaping public opinion trends towards it.
America represents the most prominent model for controlling the media, not only within its borders but also globally. It controls the flow of news and information. It allows to know what it wants and withholds knowledge that contributes to increasing the ability to fight against colonialism and capitalism. Peoples cannot participate in the struggle to achieve liberation and independence.
Ignorance of Western peoples
Whoever travels to the West as a tourist or a student at one of its universities discovers an important fact, which is the ignorance of Western peoples of the world.
The media system has deprived Western peoples of knowledge about the countries of the south, and has built for them a negative stereotype that creates fear so that America can control its attitudes towards those countries and justify the aggression on its land or capabilities.
The “lack of knowledge” increases the acceptance of Western peoples of the stereotyped image that their media paints about the peoples of Africa and Asia, an image that diminishes their humanity and depicts them as backward barbarians closer to monsters, and they need the West to civilize them and help them get rid of their tyrannical regimes, and hide that clear American role in overthrowing Arab democratic experiences And the imposition of tyrannical rulers who subject the people to American control.
This colonial mentality that controls the Western and American media is not new. The European press promoted the same stereotype of the peoples of the south in the 19th century, justifying the European colonization of Asia and Africa and the massacres against their people. America continues through its media to promote the same arrogant image that prepares the global arena for a colonial stage. New countries in the south continue to plunder their wealth.
We are facing a dominant media system that presents the world with an American perspective by controlling the news industry at the global level, and weakens the ability of the American people to correct the course, as a result of the “planned” ignorance of what is happening in the world, especially in its south.
“Negative news” is a tool of subjugation
Students in media faculties learn that bad news is better than good news, because the latter attracts the attention of the public. Is this a convincing explanation for Western media focusing on negative news about the countries of the South and ignoring the positive?!
You can notice that the countries of the south do not appear in the Western media except when an earthquake, volcano, civil war, or famine occurs, so their name is associated with disasters, and politicians and media professionals are used there to convince their people that they are better off, more stable, and more prosperous than those in crisis, and that they must therefore take care of their systems democracy.
The same logic has moved from the Western media to the media controlled by the authorities in the countries of the south. Neighboring countries do not appear in the news – often – except with disasters, and those that are exposed to political turmoil and whose residents are forced to flee their homes to a life of refuge use false narratives about them, to persuade the peoples of the region By submitting to tyrannical rulers so that they do not suffer the same fate.
“Negative news” in this way is a means to subjugate the people, whether in the North or the South. No one likes to live painful experiences that others lived through, while everyone seeks to repeat successful experiences and to deal with the successful. Therefore, success must be limited to tyrannical rulers and their powerful Western allies. Knowledge of successful experiences in southern countries, such as in Turkey, Malaysia or Singapore, is ignored or minimized.
Media dependency and inferiority complex
Even if the intent and intention disappears, the southern media that are run by authorities subject to America imitates the Western media in covering events and selecting news, focusing on news of America and Europe and ignoring the news of the countries of the south, so we remain before the paradox that the countries of the south represent more than 80% of the world’s population. But the news that flows about this huge mass does not exceed 20% in all media.
We know more about America and Europe than we know about countries and peoples with whom we have a culture, history, struggle experiences and common interests, and this reduces our ability to think about cooperation and participation with these peoples in developing new struggle experiences to build the future. To deal with “neighboring” peoples with hatred and contempt.
As a result, we can clearly notice that many southern citizens – especially the intellectuals – live in the south with their bodies, while they live in their imaginations in America and Europe, and wish to live in that developed world, and despise their backward peoples instead of leading their peoples to liberation from the old and new colonialism and building regimes. A democracy that expresses these peoples and invests their wealth.
The countries of the south have been flooded with my information about the progress of the West, which has led to an increase in the vulnerability of their peoples to colonialism and dependence and an increase in feelings of inferiority and helplessness, and that they must accept the role of consumers of Western products, and content themselves with selling their “raw” wealth.
This idea of the self Britain and France worked to inculcate in the minds of African and Asian peoples over the past two centuries, and westernized intellectuals took care of destroying the self-confidence of those peoples, which thwarted dreams and development plans in many countries.
in the face of prejudice
Thus, media bias contributed to creating the tragedy of the south and closing the way for its future, even if it brought together its peoples with religion, culture and history.
Permanent relations between peoples are based on knowledge and participation in the experiences of struggle to achieve great goals, so how can we achieve this when we do not know each other and depend on our information about the neighboring peoples who are culturally, geographically and culturally close to a biased global media?!
We do not display this painful image in order to surrender to it, but rather to raise our peoples’ awareness of the importance of defending their right to life, providing knowledge to the peoples of the world, and building a new media system that presents a true and fair picture of the world.
The first step to achieve this is for us to educate our people about the seriousness of the bias of the global media system, and to qualify many media content critics to expose their bias. Provided by the media system, it opens up areas for restoring self-confidence and liberation from the inferiority complex, and building new relationships based on cooperation, respect, and the exchange of knowledge about struggle experiences.