How to prevent News Websites from Manufacturing Opinions?
We live in a world full of information; the good, the bad and the ugly. We focus here on the kind of media houses that cater to one type of audience and generally try to paint a bad picture of the others. While there is a law to facilitate existence of such media, it is up to the general public to decide whether to allow such media houses to exist or not. One must be wondering how this is possible since they exist based on the clout and money they possess and not necessarily by the size of the audience.
While the first argument may be right to a certain extent, how long can an online news website exist without any followers? Money can buy followers for sure, but how long can such artificial following support an enterprise?
India is a multi-cultural, multi-political and multi-everything nation. People argue the very essence of our national identity is our diversity. As such, survival of differing opinions must be ensured for such diversity to thrive and for the nation as such to survive.
That point brings us to the behaviour of our media houses in preserving the diversity of our nation. While this article will not venture into assessing any individual case, we have witnessed many instances where a majority of the media houses have tried to portray a negative veiw about the majority opinions and beliefs and even suppress the voices arising out of the majority community, and largely they have reflected the views of the so called minorities over decades.
This has raised serious doubts about the origin of these media houses and particularly the source of funding they receive. Surprisingly, these houses thrive on the regular business format of all media houess; that is, direct and indirect advertisements. While direct advertisements are what we see in boxes and videos on a website, it is the indirect advertisement that is the real poison. These are articles written by a particular type of writers which propagate only a particular kind of view points, and these writers eventually get the tag of "intellectuals" for doing such work for a long time.
Naturally, they survive because someone is out there who reads these articles. In the pre-internet era, this was a miniscule of people who out of choice read such articles by subscribing to magazines and such. However, in the current era of information overflow, one falls victim to the guerrilla warfare of such media houses by clicking on links that might look innocuous to the less trained eyes. However, a reader can easily understand the bias by reading these articles. But since we are all looking for information every day, we tend to click on the links of the same websites again and again thereby giving them a standing among the internet search engines that place them at the top of their search results.
This means, even when you don't like the way they write articles and paint an unacceptable picture of the majority, you are still helping them to continue their devious efforts by just clicking on their links.
So how do we go about correcting this?
I will detail a few steps that can shut the tap for a good amount of time on these websites. They will find a way out for sure, but for a significant amount of time this will totally shut their websites to you.
As in all things internet, Google is your best friend in doing this.
You have to open news section in Google. You can just earch for "Google News" and this should throw up first among the results. If you are logged in to Google with your user name and password, you will find this easier. Google will tweak your search results based on your browsing behavior.
Once you oupen Google news, you will find a list of news articles from various websites. You like some, you don't like some. I want you to concentrate on the links that belong to the category we discussed above; the indirect advertisements that tend to manipulate opinions rather than reflect truth. Just hover your mouse (you can do this on a desktop) over the the link to the article.
As you hover the mouse over the link, under the link you can see the name of the website and the day the article was published. Just right to it, you will see three icons.
The first one is "save for later." You can ignore it.
The second one is "share". You can ignore this as well.
The third one is "More". We are interested in this. Click on "More" link. It will show you 5 links. These are
1. View Full Coverage
2. Go to "the website"
3. Hide all stories from "the website"
4. More stories like this
5. Fewer stories like this.
All you need to do is click on the third link: Hide all stories from "the website". Google will give you an option to undo this click, and you can just ignore it.
What this does is, it will stop showing articles from the particular website on all your personal devices where you login to Google.
I am not saying this will kill the website, but this is one tool we can use to let these media houses know who the boss is. There is nothing illegal about using this option, since this is an option within Google.
If you find this article useful, share this to fellow netizens. In this election year, we have to be extra careful about what we read since these articles can manipulate our view points and the results of this election.
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