Wednesday 16 May 2007

The problem with the modern media is they do not have a sense of social justice.

First of all, I would like to define the meaning of the question. According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Social justice refers to conceptions of a just society, where "justice" refers to more than just the administration of laws. It is based on the idea of a society which gives individuals and groups fair treatment and a just share of the benefits of society. Different proponents of social justice have developed different interpretations of what constitutes fair treatment and a just share.
I strongly agree that the media does not have a sense of social justice as it fails to give individuals and groups fair treatment or a just share of the benefits of society. Their main goal is to make profit hence they make more effort to attract society’s attention and interest. In order to achieve what they desire, media only report cases that caused uneasy among the society, causing tremendous fear and hopelessness to arise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Kidney_Foundation_Singapore_scandal

The NKF case is a good example of media not having a sense of social justice. The way the writer phrase the article have portrayed a very bad impression on the accused, even though the case is still running high and the verdict has yet to be announced. This is unfair especially to the accused. Besides that, having to discover about the scandal, the media also found out a lot of things about the management of the NKF fund. But the weird thing is that why this weren’t made known to the public? It is because it will only caused the public’s opinions of the old management of NKF to be more and more negative, with letters sent to the forum.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31743
The article proves that the media choose to report only news that contains issues that caused majority citizens to worry. For example, American mistakes in killing civilians in the Iraq war as they would bring about a greater response from the public and caused uneasy among them compared to reporting news about the more common news when some kind hearted Americans who saved or helped the needy.
It cannot be denied that profits encouraged the lack of justice in media. I think it’s high time that the media stops and double-checked itself. Don’t you? Hence, I conclude by stating my stand. Media have no sense of social justice.

1 comment:

Have u done ur GP? said...

There are many forms of media in our society today, for example, television, newspapers, radio, the internet, etc. The writer chooses to only focus on one form of media, the newspapers.

As in any form of media, the newspapers have a specific format. Articles are written in a crisp and concise manner to attract the attention of readers as the modern individual is definitely more busy than that of the past. Thus articles are structured to tell the reader what is going on without going into too much detail. These articles are also classified into different categories, such as Home, Science, Money, Sports so that readers can flip and check on news on their desired category.

However, there is also a section where writers engage issues which are highly relevant in our society today. This section is also known as the Review section. There, writers make their assertion on the issues and justify their stand with many points and statistics. If so, then how is the modern media, or for that matter with relevance to the writer, the modern newspaper not have a sense of social justice?

It is definitely true that the modern media is focused on earning more revenue for itself, however, it does have a sense of social justice. Also, I'd like to point out that not having a sense of social justice should not be specified as a problem in the first place. This is because the role of the media is to act as a source of information for the public, not to persuade the public to make the same stand as them. Thus, the media is supposed to be a neutral party.