How does a biased global media ecosystem shape your worldview?

The individual needs knowledge in order to be able to build his vision of the world, determine his position in it, realize how to act and achieve success, and if the media is a tool for access to knowledge, every society must train its children to deal properly with those means, develop their ability to choose the most suitable ones, and criticize the content they provide.

And the question that each individual can ask himself: What do I know about the world? The answer you can come up with is that your knowledge is limited and does not enable you to make correct judgments or formulate an opinion on a global issue.

Because man is an unknown enemy, he can respond to the campaigns launched by the parties controlling the media against (or for) any person, idea or state, thus shaping public opinion towards them.

America represents the most prominent model of control over the media, not only within its borders but globally, as it controls the flow of news and information, allowing knowledge of what it wants and withholding knowledge that contributes to increasing the ability to fight against colonialism and capitalism, so that people cannot participate in the struggle for liberation and independence.

Ignorance of Western peoples

Whoever traveled to the West as a tourist or a student at one of his universities discovered an important fact is the ignorance of Western peoples of the world, the intellectual ones do not know about Egypt only the pyramid and the pharaohs, and the Arabs only know about the desert and the camel.

The media system has deprived Western peoples of knowledge about the countries of the South, and built a negative stereotype that raises fear so that America can control its attitudes towards those countries and justify aggression against its land or resources.

"Lack of knowledge" increases the acceptance by Western peoples of the stereotype that their media paints of the peoples of Africa and Asia, an image that reduces their humanity and portrays them as backward barbarians akin to monsters, and they need the West to civilize them and help them get rid of their tyrannical regimes, and hides the clear American role in overthrowing Arab democratic experiments and imposing dictators who subject the peoples to American control.

This colonial mentality that controls the Western and American media is not reborn, as 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 peoples, and America continues through its media to promote the same arrogant image that is the global arena for a new colonial phase for the countries of the South in which they 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 "planned" ignorance of what is happening in the world, especially in the South.

"Negative news" is a tool for subjugation

Students in media faculties learn that bad news is better than good news, because the latter attracts the attention of the public, so is this a convincing explanation for the Western media's focus 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 there are used to convince their people that they are better off, more stable and more prosperous than those people in crisis, and that they must therefore take care of their democratic systems.

The same logic has moved from the Western media to the media controlled by the authorities in the countries of the South, as neighboring countries often appear in the news only coupled 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 convince the peoples of the region to submit to dictators so that they do not suffer the same fate.

"Negative news" in this way is a way to subjugate peoples, whether in the north or the south, no one likes to live painful experiences lived by others, while everyone seeks to repeat successful experiences and deal with successful ones, so success must be limited to autocrats and their powerful Western allies, and knowledge of successful experiences in the countries of the South is ignored or reduced, as is the case in Turkey, Malaysia or Singapore.

Media dependency and inferiority complex

Even if the intention and intention disappear, the southern media, which is run by authorities subject to America, imitate the Western media in covering events and choosing news, focusing on the news of America and Europe and ignoring the news of the countries of the South, so we remain in front of the paradox that the countries of the South represent more than 80% of the earth's population, but the news that flows about that huge mass does not exceed 20% in all media.

We know more about America and Europe than we know about countries and peoples with which we have a culture, history, experiences of struggle and common interests, and this reduces our ability to think about cooperating and participating with these peoples in developing new experiences of struggle to build the future.

As a result, it can be clearly observed that many southern citizens, especially intellectuals, live in the south with their bodies, while they live with their imagination in America and Europe, wishing to live in that developed world, and despising their backward peoples instead of leading their people to liberation from old and new colonialism and building democratic systems that express these peoples and invest their wealth.

The countries of the South have been flooded with information about the progress of the West, which has led to an increase in the susceptibility of their peoples to colonialism and dependency and an increased sense of inferiority and helplessness, and that they must accept the role of consumer of Western products and only sell their "raw" wealth.

This idea of self has been instilled in the minds of African and Asian peoples by Britain and France over the past two centuries, and Western intellectuals have destroyed their self-confidence, which has thwarted the dreams and development plans of many countries.

In the face of prejudice

Thus, media bias contributed to the tragedy of the South and closed the way to its future, even if its peoples had a 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 rely in our information about the neighboring peoples close to civilization, culture and geography on biased global media?!

We do not present this painful image to surrender to it, but to raise the awareness of our peoples 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 just image to the world.

The first step to achieve this is to work to educate our peoples about the danger of bias in the global media system, and to qualify many critics of the content of the media to expose their bias, and every conscious individual can play a role in this struggle using the possibilities offered by new technologies to reveal the facts, provide knowledge to peoples that the media system does not provide, and open areas to restore self-confidence and freedom from the inferiority complex, and build new relationships based on cooperation, respect and exchange of knowledge about the experiences of struggle.