When facts are partially fiction, in the media

The thing about trifle details which is part of our everyday doings, and that you see, read or hear on a regular basis (and never really pay attention to); is that once you notice them they overshadow the general main impression, experience or impact it has on you.

Like… the ticking of an alarm clock. You don’t hear it, until one night you just can’t sleep and there it is: tic-tac-tic-tac and your entire you gets so absorbed with the sound it really gets on your nerves. You are on the alert and it is impossible to get any sleep at all. You shut out everything except the suddenly really loud sound.

Every morning I try to find time to scan through today’s newspaper. It makes me feel updated on what’s on the agenda for the rest of the day. Headlines, ingress and pictures give me a guideline to what will be the talk of the day.

Or so it used to be.

There is a good chance I am a bit weird (actually I know I in many ways am); I pay attention to words. I believe that words have the power to catalyze action. I believe you can express just about any opinion prevented you choose your words right. Even an insult can be presented so eloquently it is hard to be offended.

Subconsciously I think we all, to some degree, pick up on these nuances and react to the impact the words we are exposed to have.

It goes both ways; how you speak or write affects people… and we all know that what we hear or read makes an impact on our way of thinking.

There has, for as long as I can remember, been an ongoing discussion about the importance of the press being objective. Lately, when I read the news in the morning, I find myself not really paying attention to the news itself. Like the ticking of the alarm-clock; I pay more attention to the language used.

I don’t know if it is a conscious choice, or if journalists of today are taught this is an acceptable angle to a story, but a LOT of what I read in the newspapers (in paper, and even more on online editions), and what I hear on the radio or watch/hear on TV, is not factual information: we get the journalist’s own opinion on a story, case or occurrence.

I started picking up on the choice of words different journalists tend to prefer.

Far too often the weak, and yet exposed, groups of people in society are even further degraded… or we enhance the prejudices they already suffer from, by how we express ourselves.

An example I see a lot is: the suspect is a young man of foreign descent. So; we don’t talk about the crime committed, we talk about all the foreigners who have come to our country causing nothing but trouble. Making it a disadvantage he is even young, and a man…!

The young man may very well have been born and raised here, his grandparents being the ones to immigrate, but that is not of interest: we just generalize and call them all foreigners, regardless of background or situation.

It is a problem how facts are selected, picked and chosen, deliberately leaving important arguments or facts out.

I am old enough to remember when a fight was won when the opponent lay on the ground. Today a fight is about getting your opponent to the ground so you can hit and kick him properly. Words can do that as well.

When we were presented to news before, we used to discuss issues regarding the event or situation in question.

Now I notice we more and more often discuss not the event or situation itself, but social issues the journalist chose to indicate.

We call media, the press, the fourth estate. They set the agenda by what they present to the masses.

Instead of mending our society by addressing what is wrong with our system, we are lured into brand-marking people. Blaming what is wrong on everybody else. Making us believe our community would be so much better if only we stuck to our own kind. Our people (and I think this goes for everyone, regardless of age, colour, religion and/or political stand.

It is a shame we can’t be updated on news without linguistic misguidance, which distracts us.

I can’t help but thinking this is why we tend to engage less in our local community.

Children’s sports lack trainers and coaches.

The Salvation Army is in great need of more/new volunteers as the older generation must step down.

The list is close to endless.

Instead of spending time healing what is wrong, we focus more and more on our own comfort and feel smug about ourselves because we, at least, are decent people.

And while we do so, we criticize what a bad coach our daughter has to deal with, we don’t even think about what an effort he/she does for our daughter; doing the best he/she can with hardly any help from the other parents.

Very seldom we give thanks or show appreciation. Hardly ever do we care to tell what is right or well.

We adopt the lingo from the medias where we hardly hear anything good. (And if we do it usually involves an infant or an animal.) Small children and animals are still pardoned from our negativity.

I know my postings on here are really nothing much to brag about when it comes to credibility. To be honest I don’t really spend much time on thinking them through… but then again: I never set out to be objective or informative. I just ramble on about what’s on my mind, and it is very subjective.

In many ways news is presented the same way: The press often takes side, choose to tell the part of the story which serves their agenda or cause the best way.

If we want to understand, if we want to change what is wrong about our system we need to know the full story. We can’t make it a matter about whether we like or dislike individuals. It isn’t ok to base factual info on a journalist’s personal view.

I highly appreciate learning what other people think about different things. That is how we evolve as reflective human beings. But what I would like to see is a stronger marking of what is a fact and what is an opinion, especially in the news

(Schoolbooks suffer from the same problem, as they more and more often are designed to be sellable, but that is a different matter.)

Inaccurate language and facts only inspires aggression and makes it approved of, among the masses, to talk about "us" and "them". Looking at history, that was never a good strategy.

A threat - to terrorize

Last week was a rather short schoolweek as Wednesday was the last schoolday of the week. The reason was Ascendant Day… which always takes place on a Thursday, and is a day off here. With Thursday off there really is no point in going back to school for one day… most have already set their mind on a long weekend, and I suppose the world knows by now we Norwegians even postponed end of term tests because Justing Bieber’s consert coincided. (I know there are many rumors it was cancelled, but that is not true: It was postponed.)

No need to arrange an end of term test you know only half of the students will show up for. The hassle of arranging two is just very inconvenient and expensive.

So, this Friday off is another convenient thing as well; not a holiday for religious purpose.

As it turned out, Wednesday became quite an eventful day.

The department, where I work, is in the same building as the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Organisation (NAV), and on Wednesday they received yet another bomb-scare, the third one this year, and we had to evacuate our students (for the first time) because of the threat...

We didn’t really get a lot of information, but we, the teachers, focused on keeping calm so our students would not be frightened by the armed terror police. They are 16 and older, but even though they are on the threshold of being adults, they still need the insurance only adults can give; we play the ”lived-a-long-life” card and tell them the police is on top of things and that we just do as told: trust them, and everything will be ok. To some even that is a challenge, but it is ok to show the teenagers it is true. (Police is never armed here, in any way, apart from in situations like this.)

I found out my year in Israel 23 years ago, was a great advantage. I think I was even calmer than the police themselves. Hah… of course I was: they were on the alert! They took the situation seriously, I discovered later I lulled myself into a state of refusing the possibility it was for real.

So we waited, in the rain, with our students. They needed to go back in to fetch their stuff so they could go home, and the police needed to clear the building before anyone entered. It wouldn’t have been a problem if only the students had brought their busfare card, money, keys to their cars/mopeds/motorbikes… but they didn’t; they left the building as told, and so they had no possible way to get home… we don’t encourage them to hitch-hike.

An hour later I talked to the police and the students who had their car keys were allowed to take their cars from the parking lot and leave. Half an hour later we were told we could sluice the rest of the students into the building, to get their stuff, and we could send them home.

This is like stories we hear from across the Atlantic, or in some other European or Eastern country, or any country anywhere else but here.

In spite of what we have experienced of evil, what we want is no one to pick on others, we want everybody to be good and nice, and with that as basic guiding rules you can do whatever you want… more or less. You don’t have to be friends with everybody, but you can still be friendly and polite.

After all the school shootings over the years in the U.S., administrators have established plans. They have police officers at the schools, tighter security for getting inside, fences, etc. There is actually debate about putting police officers with weapons inside schools to help curb any violence. We don’t want that. We want our schools to be safe, in every aspect.

To me the bomb scare was a rather surreal incident. Even though it was a very calm and undramatic incident, it made me think about huge tragedies. Most started with a phonecall.

People tend to not take them seriously because there are so many. They evacuate buildings, etc., but no one is really scared. Neither were we. We told jokes, talked about future plans, we talked about how the students felt about their school year now that it is almost over. It was rather nice, actually.

For some reason more and more people seem to think that to threaten others is an acceptable, alternative way to express their own profound frustration and/or rage: Regardless of whether the target is a company, an organization, a person or even just random people. To express you want to kill someone, not just take lives, but to do it by inflecting as much harm as possible, purely because they do their job, or just because they happen to be at a set place, is to me to terrorize.

I read a paper published by an Indian student; I think he put it very well:

From Old to New Terrorism: The Changing Nature of International Security

Mahdi Mohammad Nia
Department of Defense and Strategic Studies
University of Pune, India

“New terrorism takes religious and apocalyptic ideologies as its main motivations to action. The new terrorists have ambiguous goals on the systemic level and value destruction for its own sake. For the new terrorists the means are the ends. The old terrorism was comparatively intelligible, limited, precise, and frequently connected to territory, therefore making the political, cultural, or social grievance more susceptible to bargaining.

New terrorism seeks to kill as many people as possible and is specifically drawn to weapons of mass destruction. By contrast, the old terrorism targeted specific groups or institutions and was limited in its means. Old terrorism preferred centralization, hierarchical organization, and skilled personnel, but new terrorism is decentralized, more networked, and inspiration-driven, which opens it up to amateurs and nonprofessional “fighters.”

            http://globality.cc.stonybrook.edu/?p=149

It describes how come many feel they can be inconsiderate and mean enough to predict worst scenario possible as a tool to make a point. I know there is a big difference in threatening to do something and to actually carry out the threat. But to each individual who has to deal with the emotions which occur because you may, or may not, face real harm; that can very well break a person’s spirit. To do so is just not acceptable.