Topics such as climate change and people going to Syria should at least involve some in-depth research, but nowadays it's all about the presentation and less about substance or quality. The main reason behind this is the fact that nearly all these "news" corporation get the same pre- packaged nonsense and if they have the same research they have the same talking points, this is largely because we don't have a free media in the UK, they're all Government owned and they all end up sounding like a mouthpiece for the Establishment.
You see in this country free speech is not actually protected and if you dare to say anything that isn't sanctioned, you'll either get shut down or you'll have some obscure time-slot that no one can find. But proper journalism is all about informing the people and this is not the case when important issues such as our own Government spying on us are not allowed to see the light of day. The latter issue did finally make its way to the public but the people who brought it to our attention were treated as criminals and after a while the media began to manipulate the public into believing that being spied on was in their interest.
More recently the topic on everyone's lip is about the girls from Bradford travelling to Syria, the news media all dance around the real issue but not many people actually discuss it- what has driven these girls to join this cause? There is no one answer to this question, but again the mainstream news try to pin it on one thing. What would drive a sane person to go to a warzone? The British public and the institutions have to come to terms with the fact that they bare some responsibility, but no one will admit this and that is why Jon Snow on the Channel 4 news was perhaps shocked when he interviewed a women who said just that. " it's our fault".We as a society have basically demonized their religious beliefs and made them feel like they don't belong, so now they've gone somewhere they believe the belong. But we must also admit to ourselves that children can be rather stupid and easily influenced by propaganda.
This oversimplification of everything is not just in the news media, it is also evident in the entertainment industry. The plots are so simple that anyone with an I.Q of 50 can comprehend, and the characters are either bad or good and anything in between is glossed over. I'm not saying that everything is like this but the " popular" movies are always the ones with a simple plot and lots of explosions to keep you distracted. This is a troubling trend, because people tend to watch these forms of entertainment rather frequently, they are slowly being trained to think in a simple way and this can only lead to a downward trajectory in the intellect of a society. And when people have been taught to think about complex issues such as terrorism and racism in simple terms it can easily lead to hatred and violence to the vulnerable parts of society.
I'm just glad that we have TV shows like Hannibal and Elementary and we had shows like Battlestar Galactica, Boston Legal and Lost. All these showed showed complex characters doing what they believed was the right thing but may have been questionable to anyone else, and we also have the return of The X- Files, but the fact that it has only 6 episodes leads me to think that the have fallen into the trap of oversimplifying everything.
My overall plea to society is to question more things, and don't simply accept things because the people in power tell you to.
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