5.6.2021

I was quite surprised as to the extent of actions people take to control the media. It made me realize that perhaps media is in fact the most powerful medium for running the people, even surpassing politics itself. Media is all about deciding what's true and what's false, and thinking about it, feels like a tremendous privilege. So when they grasp onto the harsh realities, people are able to go to their extremes to subdue such leakage. An example that I felt was pompous, was the multimillionaire Silvio Berlusconi's attempt to hide his embarrassing nose-picking habits with the alleged abuse of his economical status. It's absurd how obvious they look as they're trying to conceal these mishaps. Just like in George W Bush's case at the press conference where his softball interviewee was discovered to be a no-body from an unknown right-wing journal, we can also see how the media's ideologies affect the presentation of a targeted political figure. I personally think George W Bush should have been more prepared, and accept the fact that he may not be able to answer to a female journalist with years of experience than to make his defeat even more evident by secretly hiring an obvious outlier into the press conference.

However, the media, which politicians and people who lead the world are scared of, are manipulative in their own ideologies, as mentioned previously. Since no such paper is necessarily unbiased, issues covering two opposing parties can lead to a lurch on either. In today's class, we focused on American media coverage towards Israeli-Palestinian relations, and I was astounded at the amount of under-represented Palestinian deaths in those papers. Even the New York Times, which I believed was a decent source had been delineating more Israeli cases at twice the number compared to the opposing region. In this case, however, I think that politics have superiority over the media because it was the politicians who decided to legion with Israel, sending a whopping 8 million dollars a day as funds (according to ifamericansknew). That doesn't mean though that the media isn't impactful when we realize the readers' unquestionableness toward the number of reportings. Congress may be able to question the president for impeachment, but the fact that the media can stay cool and conceal the truth from citizens? Now, that is a problem that needs to be addressed.

What we have heard today revolved around America's dirty reality. However, I have come to notice similarities in the way media is handled in Japan as well. As a matter of fact, while researching about Kisha Clubs the other day, I found out that the organizers of our former Prime Minister had made the press conference so that those with harder questions (mainly foreign sources) would be pushed to the back end in order to give them less time to question the president. In this way, we can notice a pattern here of politicians trying their best to sustain their reputations. And the sad truth is, it works out pretty well because the only mishap that I have read was this one time where former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe couldn't respond to a question by Reuters, and it wasn't even a mistake in speech. Therefore I was curious as to the situations in other countries and seeing if all 200 or so are dealing with the same issues. I wonder how we are able to amend and curate a healthy relationship between the media industry, and its interviewees (aka, politicians, public figures, and so forth)