Information or Propaganda - whom should we trust?

There is no such thing as free and fair reporting. Humans are incapable of it and if you don't support that bold statement think about this - we perceive something through our senses, process it and then reproduce/report it. Let's imagine it as a three step process.

Imagine standing in front of a beautiful flower that has bloomed for the first time in the world and you are the first one to spot it and as part of your job you are supposed to report it.

The first task is to identify and take a call if it is a "beautiful flower". This decision is based on the prior knowledge conscious and sub-conscious, the prior norms, documented facts about the beautiful flowers which the reporter had access to previously. This is the first step and has already been biased a lot in the selection of what is important and needs to be reported.

Our senses process hundreds of TB of information daily. The beautiful lady in the silk dress, the red ferrari, the bird which just started chirpring, the smooth sweet taste of weiss beer, the bitterness of cheese and hundreds of things like that. This is the step one which I referred as "perceive". The flower was noticed - the eye saw it. Our mind simultaneously is "processing" information. This is where the real bias comes in and we decide if the perception was valuable or just ordinary.

A child is interested in the criss cross tiles in the big haul but as grown ups mom and dad are not at all interested in it. In his preachings Buddha describes as an ultimate state where by an individual is able to detach from the present and become just an observer. Difficult for most mere mortals I guess.

And the third step is to report it in an amicable manner. It's so interesting to note here that the emphasis is on amicable more than on the reporting.


And this is why am so concerned when I look around the world.


For example today I walked around Berlin. I have seen and read hundred of videos or books about the Berlin's days during the cold war. I guess all of us know that the Berlin wall was erected by East Germany to prevent people from the East i.e. communist to defecting into the west. I am not here to justify what why where. I have very limited understanding of the world history but I want to share something I always thought about but never found answers to.

Check out this video on the Berlin Wall. It will put things into perspective.

Many people died escaping the Berlin wall. About 120 people are known to have escaped. Hundreds others were caught shot and executed.  There are hundreds of documented videos with the same footage. The Westerns helped the East Germans escape. They were very vocal and it was clearly evident in the video above as well with the fireman holding cloth to provide cushion to the people jumping out of the windows. It represented a picture that East Germany was very repressed and West was the way to go.

Let me ask a question here. Have you ever seen a video which showed what happened to the people who took the risk of crossing the wall. I haven't seen any information or documentary of there lives. And if that question is not enough think about hundreds who lost their lives doing so. Was it worth doing it. No one knows and we all have been fed to belief the life in West was good compared to East. And I guess over the period of so many years we have all soaked the information.

This is what media reporting does. No one feels the importance of reporting what is not happening in Tunisia. The reporting process that i discussed in the start still has to go through a filter of vested interest and propaganda be it economical or whatever. This is the thin red line where by revolutionary fighters like Azad before 1947 were referred to as "terrorists" in India and after that they have been acknowledged as "freedom fighters".

So the question is what is the real story of Libya? Why are the people willing to die in Chattisgarh? Who are these Maowadi - who are Naxalites. And we will never know because the media is allegedly in control of people like Barkha Dutta and Vir Sanghvi who have been tainted in the Radia Tapes.

So the question is whom do we trust and what to we make out of the news beaming into our living rooms. Information or propaganda and if you think you know - are you sure?

And the answer probably lies with in you and the question itself. Decide for yourself can we trust others?