The Purpose Of Journalism

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Throughout the history, media have always been used as a powerful instrument to manipulate people and to create thoughts, reactions, and actions for the benefit of the power owners. This does not mean that there was no time when media and journalism were used for the sake of good and were obliged to nothing but the truth. However, the dark side of its usage is far outweighed than its real aim nowadays. Like in 1984, media and journalism have a significant influence in shaping thoughts and maybe the most efficient role to strengthen the power of the ruler, in this case the Party. While the purpose of journalism is to provide information to people in order to make them free and let them free to make the best possible decision about their societies, …show more content…

In the book, the Party has a slogan ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ In other words, the Party has control over the history. It is achieved by controlling the history and memory, simply by using Newspeak. It can be seen as a smart technique but really hazardous for individual minds. They falsify the history and alter the facts according to their own benefits. A person who reads Yeni Şafak may know the created reality, not the truth. Is this what they call impartial journalism? In a society, does one have to read more then one newspaper to know what is going on in his country? Since people in Oceania are not allow to have any object which is related with their past or that can remind the past, they have only their memories to trust. However, their memories are twisted by doublethink so that it is easy to impose these new fake information to the brains. Yesterday’s news in Turkey goes in a hole of memory and the evidences of what happened is swept under the carpet. The agenda of the country changes rapidly so that we may not be able to remember what happened last month. If the records are changed somehow by unknown, who is going to believe in what? In 1984, since there is no evidence of the past, no one could prove what happened; and human memory is something fallible, the Party says. Fortunately, Turkish people have social media to spread the information simultaneously so that no one thinks that they become insane. In Oceania, they have no communication tools, not even speaking, so that they could not share their opinions and have to deal with (if they have) their inner-personal conflicts alone. As a result, in both cases, what the Power says becomes the truth of past and

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