التسميات

الأحد، 20 مايو 2018

Seeing The Truth Through Arab News Sites

By Kathleen Fisher


Information helps color how a person sees the world. No one lives in a bubble where information is unnecessary. As such, people often follow and keep up with the hat happens during the day. But the source of this news varies from person to person and from medium to medium, and one such source is Arab news sites.

Because the mind is so fundamentally inquisitive, keeping up with the news is a great way to keep it stimulated. Simply following stories can make a person seem more aware of the world, if it does not make them so. Lastly, a person is shaped by society at large, so it is important to keep up with what and how society is doing.

News used to be an oral tradition. Heralds would strand in public spaces and proclaim whatever was going on that day. Then society turned to newspapers, where everything was printed and then distributed. This meant that the news could be consumed at leisure. Then television entered into the fray. Then everything changed. At the dawn of the new millennium came a seismic shift in how information was distributed, it was the beginning of the internet and the websites that people turned to the get the news.

There is no way to understate the importance of empathy, not just in journalism, but also in life. Empathy is the ability to understand the feelings or the emotions of another person. When delivering the bulletins, there must be some degree of empathy in order to fully understand a story. The objective truth provides only a surface level understanding of a story. Because people so often act out of emotion, being able to understand the underlying emotional cause of a story, paired with the objective truth, provides a deeper, more meaningful understanding of any narrative.

Newsmen can be split up into two camps, journalists and pundits. The latter often claims to be the former and the former is often accused of being the latter. The terms are so often used interchangeably, but the two are vastly different from each other even if there is some overlap. For starters, journalists seek out the truth, for a journalist, the objective is the truth. A pundit meanwhile cares more about a narrative, to make the audience lean a certain way, the truth is incidental to a pundit, the reaction of an audience is the objective.

All too often, stories get spread without facts being checked. When people share fake stories, it erodes trust, not just in the media institutions, but also in the world in general. Fake stories also perpetuate any ingrained prejudices that some people may already have.

Information can be limited in some parts of the world. All too often, stories from certain parts of the world wind up being about some new terrorist attack. While there are parts of the Middle East that are lousy with terrorism, there are also parts of it that are stable and even prosperous, more so than some parts of the west.

The truth must be made free. A press that is not free is not a press at all, it is a propaganda machine. Any law that seeks to limit that freedom should be struck down.

What people know will color their perception of the world. It is important then to be aware of sources. Skepticism is healthy, but paranoia is not.




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