By Rania Mjahd
Morocco World News
Fez, July 17, 2013
As everybody may know, we are living in a world where millions of events are taking place everyday. We have never witnessed the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria or Libya and we have never seen the wars in Iraq or Palestine with our own eyes, but journalists tell us about the daily events and changes taking place ‘out there’ in the world beyond our immediate experience. Therefore, we have no assurance or guarantee that what is represented by media institutions is an accurate picture of the world because whatever is written or said about the world is a second hand reality created and depicted by media institutions.
The hidden ideologies and agendas of the media can be summarized into three major points: discrimination, commercialization and bias, but I will focus mainly on discrimination and commercialization.
Discrimination
I believe that Moroccan media professionals are the promoters of gender discrimination when they deprive female journalists of discussing and debating serious issues. If you read our newspaper, we find that female journalists report only trifle topics such as fashion and cooking. Through this they automatically confirm the idea that journalism is a ‘man’s job’ due to a belief that women would be put into situations where they would not know how to react, which I find unfair.
Discrimination does not appear only among media professionals, but even in the language used in press, which maintains discrimination against a specific group. In the world of the press, language plays a crucial role in reproducing and facilitating discrimination against certain “groups.” Besides, it creates a sort of binary line or boundaries between those groups through categorizing them as Roger Fowler revealed: “The power of discourse in facilitating and maintaining discrimination against ‘members’ of ‘groups’ is tremendous. Language provides names for categories, and so helps to set their boundaries and relationship… Vocabulary divides ‘actress’ from ‘actor’, the ‘ess’ ending making actress as a special and unusual case; classifies ‘immigrant’ as a special and deviant group… vocabulary which contributes to the reproduction of discrimination in discourse.”(Fowler, 1991:94). In light of what has been clearly demonstrated by Fowler, one can say that media professionals may maintain discrimination against “members” of “groups” via the clever use of language.
Commercialization of the press
Nowadays, one may notice that the majority of our newspapers start accommodating the features of “down market” press (tabloids). This means that our newspapers become pictures-based rather than words-based newspapers. Also, they start giving extra attention to sensational issues like sex, rape, gossip columns about celebrities and providing huge sections for advertisements so as to achieve a high rate of circulation.
This bitter reality pushes me to say that our press is no longer an informative institution that preserves the right of citizens to discover what is happening around them but rather it is an “entrepreneurial institution” based on profit and money-making.
In conclusion, as educated people, we should not be passive consumers who swallow everything said or written by media. We should rather get rid of our naivety to be able to interact with this clever institution. By the same token, we should advocate for a media that is based on freedom of expression. A media that promotes democracy and preserves people’s rights to know what is happening around them with impartiality rather than a media that serves the ideological and political affiliations of its owners.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News’ editorial policy
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