The press is not the enemy of the people

Attacks on the news media is not a new phenomenon, but something that we have witnessed over the course of history from dictators as well as from democratically elected leaders.

The current President of the United States was not the first nor will he be the last to criticize and label the press as the enemy of the people. However, it is important to take cognizant of the age we live in today, an age of citizen journalism where every Tom, Dick and Harry has the power to influence public opinion at the click of a button.

Calling the press the enemy of the people, because it disagrees with government policies or is too critical of a leadership can lead to dangerous consequences. 

It creates doubt and an atmosphere of confusion in an already fragile media environment in which the public are increasing receiving misleading and unverified news from social media such as Facebook.

Today, many people, especially the youth are unfamiliar with traditional news outlets and their primary source of news is social media. As a result, they consume information from just about anyone, without verifying the validity of the information or the credentials of the source. Some examples include the false and unconfirmed information that spread on the mobile messaging platform WhatsApp in India which led to the killing of innocent lives and in Myanmar (or Burma) where Facebook posts based on false information encouraged and led to the torture and murders of people of the Rohingya tribe who are mainly Muslims.

If a world leader is calling the mainstream media ‘fake’ and the ‘enemy’, then where are people to go to for accurate, factual and reliable information?

What is real news and what is fake news when the US President has been found to create his own truths by lying over and over again and still continues to perpetuate the untruths, even when the facts have been pointed out to him?

Surely the mainstream media is not perfect, but that is no reason to continuously denounce it, but to rather continue to call out the untruths and demand retractions or rectifications. In a world where false and unverified information is the order of the day, and where it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify false news, the media has an even more crucial role to play in helping us recognize false stories and provide us with the facts and the real stories.