Don't Be Fooled: The Art of Diversifying News Sources

Imagine this: You’re sitting in a café with your friend, you two sipping on a cup of Atay. The conversations heat up and you find yourselves in a hot debate. You both are defending your opposing views strongly, almost questioning your friendship. Sounds familiar? As you battle, you notice that you both are acting from completely different sets of "facts." This frustrating situation frequently arises when you both consume news from sources with differing, and often opposing, agendas.. Welcome to a world of battling media agendas instead of your friends' views. 

Let's break down what a News agenda is

Everyone has an Agenda, even yourself, and with Media, you can’t even trust the "appearing good" ones. Don’t believe it? Watch and observe!

I hate to break it to you, but no political news is genuine or a reported reality. Reporters instead, take the reality, process it into a filter, which is the medium’s political agenda, and represent it to you as the pure reality. When you consume News from one source, you can only get to see One Side of reality, and the only way to take a glance at the hidden sides is to look for the same News piece from other sources with preferably different agendas that don't hide one other side. Only after looking at different sources, might you then stick the pieces together to form a broader picture of reality. Reality is, therefore, a mosaic of information from many different sources. 

If you feel like you didn’t quite grasp how the media agenda works, we got you! Take a look at this diagram and see how the media agendas act like a filter of News.

But WHY?

The news reporters are doing all this to manipulate you to believe in what they try to feed people. Tremendous efforts are put into forming your views and opinions because your beliefs control your actions, and your actions serve them! See how it works? The benefits they get from your beliefs can be political, financial, religious, ideological, or just to turn you against their competitors.

                        Examples:

Let us now look at a simple example far from politics.

A person, definitely not called Alex Jones (and we’re definitely not calling out names) might have hosted a show where he promoted conspiracy theories and fake news. One of the conspiracy theories might have been that in tap water, there are chemicals that turn frogs homosexual. “The majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay,” Jones might have said in 2017. The claim was without evidence. Till now, Alex Jones was just expressing and spreading his ideas, so how is people’s belief in this gonna benefit him, you might ask. Well, after a while, Jones started promoting his product: a water filter that gets the 'gayness' out of you, alfa males! See now how your beliefs benefit them!

Now let's address the elephant in the room and tackle political examples!

In this example, we are looking at a real-life issue reported by two channels with conflicting agendas. Not going too far, we are providing examples of two of the most famous channels in the Arab world that have a worldwide audience: Al Jazeera and AL Arabiya channels.

Here is a news by Al Jazeera, reporting on what’s happening in Yemen: The famine and poverty caused by the Saudi occupation and guardianship in Yemen:

To grasp this better, we need some background information :

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have diplomatic conflicts, and each one uses its media to serve its political agenda. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya are owned by Qatar and Saudi Arabia respectively, This means that they are both the mouthpieces of the countries they’re owned by, and the two countries are competing on who’s going to be or stay the most powerful political power in the Arab World. In layman's language, they are basically in a political cold fight! Actually, It is sometimes called The New Arab Cold War.

So..

Even when we think a piece of news is innocent, it’s in reality just a means to an end.

On the other hand, here is Saudi Arabia trying to use Al Arabiya to seem like a hero in the war in Yemen:

What to do: Diversify your News sources 

What we need to conclude from this is to never trust one source, whatever it is. Look for the same news from different, preferably opposing, sources and add the pieces together to inform a broader picture of what's actually happening.

To do this you kinda have to know a little bit about the world’s political situation, and if this sounds hard, we got you! There is a section in Merken magazine called Politics 101 where we tackle the beast of politics in a simple easy-to-grasp way.

Finally, 

Stay safe out there, be skeptical, and don’t forget to diversify your sources!

They seem like they’re trying to speak about and help Yemen, sounds innocent, right? But there is a biting agenda behind it.

In this News example and many others, AL Arabiya attempts to gloss over the war in Yemen. It tries to show that Saudi Arabia is trying to help Yemen to be liberated and freed although the war caused famine, placed Yemen under a state of siege, and prevented WHO's aid in Yemen. Al Arabiya has never covered this fact and ignored it.

The reason for this difference in the way the Yemen News is presented arises from the fact that in terms of this issue, Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera have opposing Agendas. 

Now imagine that you consume Yeman News from Al Jazeera, aware of the famines and the inhuman conditions, and your friend reads AL Arabiya thinking Saudi Arabia is trying to stop the war Then at the Atay session, you both would almost consider each other out of mind for the views that are 'obviously wrong'' in your opinion.

Remember, this is just an example, but all media channels work in similar ways for different purposes. 

Please leave us your opinion or ask any questions!