April 30th

Today's LLA lecture was done by our lovable teacher Rab with the stream 2 students. It was funny how most of the stream 1 students gathered up at the back of the room knowing that Rab will pick on us during class. Anyways, the topic was about propaganda. In his lecture, he mentioned the different types of propaganda that we need to be critical about. First came ownership. The role of the authority plays a great part in the selection of information for the reason that the owner can make decisions based on his/her own preferences. Second was advertising. Since media receives a great amount of money from advertisement, they have the power to persuade them to kill certain stories in order to keep profit. Third was access. The accessibility for upcoming interviews may be limited by any disturbing news about that person. Therefore, media will try to select information in order to protect future opportunities. Forth was flak. Choice of news may also occur as a mean to avoid undesired lawsuits, and negative publicity and threat. The last one he mentioned was ideology. Media will not expose certain information that would worsen a particular person's reputation. The video that he showed of Berlusconi picking and actually eating(Gross!) his nose was really entertaining!How Rab explained each factor along with a Japanese example made me comprehend better because it enabled me feel the topic much more closer.

No one can deny the massive influence that media acts on our daily life. Mass-media such as newspapers, internet, and television programs are so close to us that we cannot avoid getting affected by them. It is the fault of those media sources that block us from accessing accurate information. However, it is impossible to ask them to quit modifying information in this profit-centered society. Censorship is inevitable. Therefore, all the receivers of media should take this propaganda for granted. Instead of blindly taking in whatever information we can get, we must take a closer look into that piece of information and identify it more deeply. We must constantly pose the question "why?".This process of will enable us to acquire multiple viewpoints, and mostly importantly, the ability to think critically.