Experience has shown me that readers of this blog do not comment whenever I write about the media. I am not deterred. So, from time to time, I still visit the subject hoping that people read what I write even if they do not comment about it.
I think that the media are too important a subject to be ignored by commentators. Besides, I think I know something about the subject and can help people better understand and manage this greatest phenomenon of contemporary culture.
This time I take my cue from two interesting conferences about the subject I attended in the last two weeks. One conference looked at the phenomenon from the perspective of the news industry while the second looked at it from the perspective of users.
The first conference was held on October 15, 16. Titled "News Exchange: A survival guide for the News Industry", the conference was organized by the European Broadcasting Union in collaboration with PBS Ltd. Our national broadcaster is continually being criticized (sometimes fairly, other times very unfairly) but hardly anyone sings its praises when occasion demands it.
This was such an occasion.
PBS are to be lauded for a fantastic conference. Well done! But let's look at the beef, especially from the perspective of us media users.
The first and the concluding sessions set the tone and established the flavour. Tim Marshall, the Foreign Affairs Editor of Sky News, led a panel that simulated a newsroom during a particular busy day. The panel was made of journalists from CNN, NOS, Bloomberg and a web editor. Editorial and ethical issues were discussed while reviewing the fictitious imminent emergency landing of an airplane, an announcement on the Wall Street Journal blog of a financial scandal greater than Madoff's, a wikepedia insertion alleging malpractice by the airline company, the intervention of the advertising manager, the circulation of photos indicating possible sabotage, etc.
How are the traditional media (or the 20th century media, as Tim Marshall cynically called them) facing the challenge of the 21st century or digital media? Is being first a greater value that being correct?
Given that Tweeter and the other social networks publish the news as soon as they have it, should television and radio do the same? Do we expect them to check and double check? Or would we accuse them of hiding something if they are not the first with the news? How does all this affect us users?
During the session Tim Marshall played with our emotions, sense of judgment and journalistic instinct of striking a scoop. At the end it happened that the allegations about the airline company were false, the web page of the Wall Street Journal was a zombie and the photograph was a manipulation of Photoshop.
It turned out that the guy from the new media continuously took a very cowboyish attitude to publishing the news while the journalists from TV were generally very prudent.
It seems that the latter media are slower but surer means of information, though the valid contribution of the social networks should not be ignored. In fact, on several instances it was essential and very important.
Discerning use is, probably, the name of the game.
Towards the end of the conference Roland Schatz, the President of Media Tenor International, showed us the inherent dangers of the commercialized media systems.
His organization researched the coverage of the financial downturn or perhaps better, financial catastrophe. Basing themselves on the same corpus of facts the American media and the German media were giving us readers, viewers and listeners radically different pictures of the situation, he said. (In Malta some still marvel how and why our media give us different pictures of the same local situations!)
He showed how the media were creating panic by using the word recession even though the economic situation did not warrant the use of that word. He showed how industries in distress made the headlines while industries that were progressing never made the news bulletins.
The result: people were being misinformed and media coverage is - at least partly - to blame for the fracas. There is so much news out there that it is not always possible to know what's true or not; what is reliable and what is not. There is a lot of manipulation, bias, slanted news and sensational items. Audiences have the duty to be aware and also to look at different sources. The presentation of Schatz clearly manifested our vulnerability when faced by the media.
This brings me to the second conference that I am attending while writing this blog. I am presently (October 23) at Bellaria in north Italy. I am attending the European congress on media literacy. There are many definitions and descriptions of media literacy or media education. In simple terms one can say that media education is a means of empowering people by changing them from media users into media partners i.e. persons who are in control of their media use which is for them an occasion for enjoyment and information, among other things.
Malta has been at the forefront of media education movement and the European Commission has acknowledged our country as one of the small number of European countries which has had media education on their curricula for many years. Media education is not a movement to rubbish the media or to get people away from the media. Media education does nothing of the sort.
However, media education help people enhance their enjoyment of media use which should help them be better citizens and human persons. The basic premise of what we do can be thus summerised: If someone lives by the sea it is better to teach him/her to swim than trying to build a wall around the sea.