In Other Words

Footbal and Censorship

So Holland finally wins their first game in this European cup. Hurrah. Truth be told, its still the bloody Germans that handed us the change to continue into the quarter finals. That and the Czechs playing well enough with their B team to win the thing. It was basically the Czechs decision who got to go into the quarter finals and keep playing. Apparently they liked the Dutch more then the Germans. Thank god for the Second World War (just kidding! (Kind off)).

It might be important to note that the Dutch companies in the Czech republic did offer a million dollars, or euros, or something like that if the Czechs won. Which is probably a bit of extra motivation for them. Of course if the Germans would have offered a million dollars then it would have been corrupt. Throwing the match. Nothing wrong with asking them to try even harder though, right? Strange world.

On a side note there was an interesting article in the Today paper that claims that they will no longer show images of the beheadings happening in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. They said that they did not want to cater to the terrorists and said that this self imposed censorship would take away the reason for the terrorists doing what they did. They said that we should support this type of censorship and called on us to choose to do it on the internet as well.

I disagree. Censorship is wrong (though the Singaporean government might not see it that way). It is only through seeing both the bad and the good that we can understand the world around us. By hiding what is ugly we skew the people’s worldviews and make them misunderstand what is occurring.

If there are no pictures people might forgive them. In ten years times the words in the articles will be forgotten and the world might start seeing the terrorists as something else (liberators or freedom fighters). That should not happen. The images will stay in our mind much longer then the words and they will remind us who these people are, what these people have done.

This was what Abu Ghraib was all about. There were dozens of stories floating around on the internet that discussed the abuse and horror of what was going on. Nobody cared, nobody listened. It was only when the pictures came out that somebody said ‘hey, hold on a minute’ and then, suddenly, outrage. A picture is worth a thousand words.

If people are really afraid that this will cause international hatred towards the Muslim world, despite the fact that there are only a small faction doing these horrible misdeeds then the newspapers, TV stations and magazines should stop being so skewed in their representation of the war. If they would stop sensationalizing and start educating more people would realise the truth.

These images shouldn’t be taken out of the paper, instead more images should be added. Different images, better images. Images with the right headlines ‘boy saves American soldier’ ‘crowd cheers saviours’ ‘women help free prisoner’ ‘more then two hundred soldiers married local girls’. Where are those stories?

Somebody is bound to respond ‘we don’t print those, because nobody wants to see them’. Well I believe a newspaper’s job isn’t to give people what they want to hear, its to give them what they need to hear.

Some English newspaper tsar who maintained the highest reader total in the history of the English newspapers was once asked if it wouldn’t be wiser to poll the people and find out what they wanted to read about. He scoffed at that and said ‘The people will read what I want them to read’ and that was that. It worked for him, so maybe it worked now. Don’t give them less, give them more.

posted by Symbol @ 24.6.04