Why you can't always trust the media.

I was blog hopping this morning and came across a post that was berating a phenomenon that had caught on in Canada and the US that was basically about men behaving badly and bombing live newscasts.  Various video clips had gone viral.

You’ll probably be able to work out what I’m talking about with a bit of googling but I’m trying hard not to give the whole thing any more airtime than possible and you’ll see why below.

That might sound strange given that the targets of the bad behaviour were women (and I’m all for defending women’s rights) but, as I hadn’t heard of this issue (and it was using an acronym that I wasn’t familiar with) and it was quoted as being something that also happened here in the UK I decided to do a bit of digging.

What I found was that it appears to have been started deliberately by someone who wanted to just get attention and create a video posting that would go viral.  So it was reported that the first incident of this behaviour had happened when really it had all been a set up.  And the set up had included a woman.

The point I’m trying to make here (albeit a bit haphazardly) is that we can’t always trust the media.  It can tell us things that are not true and it can influence our actions.  In this case in a very negative way.  Of course I’m appalled at the way the men were behaving.  Being derogatory towards women, or anyone for that matter is not acceptable.  But I’m also appalled that when I tracked back this all started because of a stunt to get attention and the unsuspecting public took it on board and ran with it.

Yes, you can argue that by commenting on it like this I’ve joined that crowd but given the options of just being able to click on a video link in a post or having to go away and google, how many of the people reading this post will bother to do the googling? 

Clicking on video links is so easy and most of us (myself included) will do this and comment on it and then it perpetuates. But sometimes it’s worth looking beyond what’s placed in front of us and finding the truth.  We shouldn’t always be sheep.