Modern Media, inform or misinform?

In the last years, the world had been turned upside down quite a bit and groups as several extreme right movements and extreme left movements got extremely powerful in big parts of the western world.
I had been thinking a lot about this and after analyzing this and discussing this topic carefully over the last 2 years I decided that for me the real culprit for this: ****The media****

Now, I believe that this change actually occurred due to a combination of factors but, in my opinion, the two main influences came from modern media.
I want to group the actual causes into three groups:

• Sensationalism
• Generalizations
• Social Media

What happened:

To understand how the above three could start this development we have to think about the current state of the world and what was happening to put it in context accordingly.

First of all, we had some chaos in the middle east (mainly caused by western interests in oil and power) which lead to a huge wave of fugitives rolling to the gates of Europe.
At the same time, issues in Ukraine (Caused by the Nato trying to get Ukraine on their side to pressure Russland) and while we were at it, an increasing crisis in North Africa caused by the instability which was left behind after the "Arab spring" (again forced by western interests).

Now, of course, Europe could've been prepared for this because everyone should've seen this coming by carefully analyzing this and it could also have been prevented partially by not meddling around in other countries business.
But it was too late for that.

Now, in the end, we had three massive factors causing the huge amount of immigrants. At the same time, we had a serious case of incompetence on the government level, which lead to badly distributing the fugitives, heavy issues with controls, strong issues with the integration also because none of the governments were actually prepared for that.

On the basis of that, a number of this fugitives did not follow the common law in a few of these countries and others even executed terroristic attacks which made this situation even worse which brings us to the first topic.

Sensationalism

Okay, what then happened was modern media using these terroristic attacks and several of the violent actions of a part of the fugitives to print one article after the other to keep people informed to sell their newspapers.
Not a day went by without reading about the ISIS, terroristic attacks, violent Moslems, etc in the newspapers.
While many of these crimes had also been committed by the local population neither people nor the newspapers were interested in most of these stories.
While this also was the perfect way to give extremists free advertisement and give them the stage they wanted, as a side effect, spread an immense fear in many people in the western world.
While many people in the western world lived together with Moslems without many problems for many years other areas didn't have as many contacts which made it so much easier for them to start believing that these Moslems must mean bad news.
This is also why the antipathy against the fugitives came especially strong from these areas (Oriental Germany, Poland, Hungary) and less from heavily populated areas like Stuttgart or Munich for example.

As we're all only humans, it is natural to be afraid of the unknown and especially afraid of the unknown the media has been spreading fear of in the last 6 months.

As a result of this, in several countries resistance was formed against the fugitives which was quite often organized by leaders of the extreme right and neo-nazis.

The media, as a result, which was previously spreading all this fear of the fugitives, found a new topic victim to write about.

Generalizations

Which bring us to the next part. Now, the mainstream media could've understood that they were spreading fear and they could've been intelligent and could've tried to calm the people down again.
But, they chose the worst option possible.
They decided to mark all these afraid people to be Nazis, extreme right, racists etc.
Which, in turn, of course, lead to two things:
Most of these people:

• Stopped reading and believing the mainstream media and changed to other forms of media.
• Started organizing themselves against the media and fugitives.

Social Media

Okay, so these people came then to social media, especially Facebook where they would encounter two especially powerful components:

• An artificial intelligence which would prefilter all content and deliver them only the content which matched their view of the world making them think that the vast majority thinks as they do.
• Tons of real neo-nazis and racists using the anonymity of the net to spread false facts, fake news, wrong statistics and invented stories.

Which, of course, radicalized all these groups and resulted in the current mess we have.

And the worst of all:

No one learned from all of this

The mainstream media still thinks that insulting these people is the best way to go which makes these people stick to their alternative media and facebook still filters their content and only shows them their point of view.

My solution proposal:

Interestingly the long-term solution for all of this could be pretty simple and all of us could participate in this:

• Vote for a government which doesn't meddle in other countries
• Don't follow the sensationalism and don't provide them with clicks.
• Share the true stories on social media to increase the chance of them being seen.
• Educate people and don't insult them for having a different opinion.

Now, of course, we can't do this alone, the mainstream media has to help with this, which is quite difficult to achieve, because they must:

• Stop insulting these people and start educating them.
• Stop giving the extremist (of the right and the left) a stage for their opinions.
• Start criticizing the government for meddling and for failing to integrate.

I hope you liked today's post and maybe I was even able to change your opinion.
I'll see you the next time!