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The international corporate media has not been honest in its reporting of the refugee situation in Europe. This is becoming clearer year by year, because some o
by fareesh 8y ago
The international corporate media has not been honest in its reporting of the refugee situation in Europe. This is becoming clearer year by year, because some of the facts that were earlier dismissed as racist rhetoric are now becoming very difficult to ignore. For example earlier this year, Chancellor Merkel finally admitted that there are "no-go" zones in the country where even the police dare not go. This is an extremely serious problem.
People flock to this content because they are not getting the whole truth from the corporate media, and that is the root of this problem. YouTube's content would not be compelling if these things were being reported honestly, and given the same degree of volume as other important stories.
In my country, India, there are plenty of places in which the value systems are completely at odds with ideas of gender equality, religious tolerance, racial equality, and LGBT equality. If a western country were to create pockets of populations where people held these values, it would be extremely incompatible with the norm in the societies that they have achieved today. As a result, these places would be radically transformed into incredibly dangerous areas, particularly for women and LGBT folks. It is not bigoted to point this out, it is true because this reality exists in our country, and it is one that we are aware of and grapple with. Of course it will exist in another country if a large enough number of people who hold these ideas are imported en masse. If these values existed in Syria or Sudan or other parts of the world where refugees are coming from, of course this will become a problem for the country that is resettling them. This was a valid criticism that did not get a fair enough deal from the media, and the consequences have been life altering for many Europeans.
The dream of multicultural societies where everyone lives together in harmony requires everyone to buy into it. If there are bad actors, and others are aware of this, it does not make them bad actors too. The media seems to have been hesitant, perhaps because of fears of stoking xenophobia by providing it with legitimate information that could be compelling for their cause. There is never a good reason not to tell the truth about these things, this is the result of what happens when you go down that path. At this point, many are convinced that the news media had sinister and not well intentioned motives, behind why this was done, and as a result trust in the news media too will decline rapidly, in favor of rag tag YouTube operations.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoIt can be true and racist at the same time. If you never care about rapes except when it’s a dark skinned perpetrator in a white dominated country, then you are both racist and correct that that rape amongst refugees is an important issue.
- TangoTrotFox 8y agoI think you're setting up a strawman there. What he's saying is that media organizations are intentionally ignoring issues that would stand out by themselves, but choose not to cover them because of certain characteristics of the offenders. This leads to extremism as people who rely on those sources for news coverage end up completely misinformed about the world and find people discussing matters to be doing so out of some form of ism and 'fake news' rather than because it may be an increasingly serious problem. And it also fuels extremism on the other end as they also see the lack of reporting as 'fake news' and it fuels questions about the motives involved in not covering these issues. In my opinion, this quite rapid shift from the news trying to inform people (though of course there some lens of bias) to the news quite overtly trying to control people's actions is probably playing a major role in the rapid and, arguably deserved, deteriorating trust in the media. But that destruction of trust from the sources with the resources to carry out impartial reporting is doing nobody any good.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoYou think there are no real people who only care about rape when it’s interracial? That is what straw man means. You think I described a man who doesn’t exist?
- factsaresacred 8y agoI'll take this one: when you open your doors to people fleeing war and part of that population turn out to be over-represented in sexual assault crimes at a rate 4 times that of natives, this anomaly warrants investigation and often outrage. Why? Well if it's not obvious, your society has been made more dangerous due to policies you had no say in, and when you voiced concern that something like this might occur you were called the very epithet you just used - "racist". Hence why people 'care'. I mean do we not remember the mass sexual assault in Cologne? Or the same in Sweden's summer festivals? This is not normal and demands attention.