I have seen this in USA and now after returning to India have seen the same trend here, where the emergence of 24 hr news channels has created fear and paranoia among the public. Whether it be swine flu, terrorism or the most recent example of the blow up of the conspiracy theory regarding YS Rajasekhar Reddy’s murder.
In USA, the mainstream news channels do not question the government and are all controlled by corporations. These corporations manipulate the news and only show what is needed. It was evident in the way the government controlled all the news media and created a hysteria using lies to attack Iraq. Now they have found their latest fear topic “Yemen” after the december 25th failed terrorist attack. You may laugh at it but to see real news you have to watch comedy central’s The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They use comedy as a guise to tell the truth.
In India, the news was fairly independent till the 90′s. But with capitalism taking root, more and more 24 hr news channels are being opened by corporations and politicians to spread their opinion and control the public opinion. All the newspapers are aligned with one political party or the other and show news through their views and not with an independent non-partisan view.
During the recent swine flu outbreak, everyday the newspapers and news channels will show images of people wearing masks and use sensational headlines that people are living in fear. Out of the 3 months of that news, I saw may be one person wearing mask in public and used to wonder where do these people get these images from, do they stage manage them?
The general public needs to understand this and stop watching news channels which spread lies and hatred.