The mind games of the media

Illustration/Uday Mohite

A pietous belief of the 20th century was that media in itself was a power for good. As with many declarations about technology this sleight-of-hand encourages us to be passive consumers of media as an instrument of truth. It encourages us to be dependent on the media for our political understanding, rather than nurturing the autonomy of critical thought and indeed critical emotion vis-a-vis media and therefore, poiltics.

In the days since Israel escalated its aggressive war on Palestine, we have seen the result of this idea on speed. Media can and has been used to shape the way people think, and so, manufacture consent for injustice and cruelty. The readiness of so many mainstream news outlets around the (particularly Western) world to relay Israeli propagandahas been remarkable. Mainstream television news participated in uncritically repeating information about beheaded babies, only to later report that "actually Israel can't confirm it is so". Well media, what about you? What can you confirm? An utterance feeds the virus of prejudice and spreads far by the time oopsies are declared on television. That pattern has repeated itself over and over, which says everything about its intentions. It's an old playbook. The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" was the actual weapon of mass destruction in the end, as we too dangerously forget.

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Those who talk most strenuously about seeing "both sides" often mean they speak from one side about the other in order to invalidate it. That is why the relentless work of individuals and small groups becomes so important in putting out the realities mainstream media keeps out - the protests, the suffering, the vigils, the commentary, and strikingly, the constant fact checks. When people with a fraction of the resources mainstream media has can do fact checks, while big media merely reports the statements of dominant powers as facts, tells you where big media is at, yaniki, not really interested in fact. The claim of objectivity is merely a theatre of acting detached, while being willfully biased. Talk of facts is often simply the performance of something that looks or sounds like a fact to enact that bias.

This manipulation cannot be countered only by facts, but also by passion, belief, and sometimes art which reveals the constructs of media. A most powerful instance of this was the satire Bassem Youssef performed in his appearance on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show. By constantly saying "I agree with you Piers, those SOB Palestinians should be killed", he refused to assume the role of a defensive opposition that Piers Morgan tried to cast him in. He subverted the binary narrative that Morgan was architecting in which Morgan stood for truth and goodness, a judge in media court, demanding that Youssef prove himself innocent - a proxy for Palestine being guilty until proven innocent. By becoming a mirror image of Morgan, Youssef turned Morgan's gaze onto his own statements to reveal their hypocrisy. This unsettled and refused the moral authority people like Morgan assume (yaniki, white is right types) allowed its immorality and lopsidedness to emerge as Morgan sought power in schoolmarm admonishments of "please mind your language".

These moments underline that the road to co-existence lies in us retaining autonomy over our critical thinking and capacity for compassion, and wresting this autonomy back from the mind games of the mainstream media.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com