Quickly – look away from the screen…
…can you read what follows before you look back to the screen again?
Technically the last half of the previous sentence will never be seen except for the author who has just written it. At the first reading that is…
Got an idea of where we are going yet?
I had the honour of attending the soccer game between South Africa and Uruguay on 16 June 2010.
During this rather controversial game, Itumeleng Kune, the South African goalkeeper was handed a red card and sent off the field for an alleged foul committed on the Uruguayan forward bearing down on the goal.
The referee’s decision was clearly wrong – for all to see; the Uruguayan forward was clearly offside but was not flagged by the linesman. Kune was sent off and the resultant penalty was converted to a goal which started the demise of the South African effort.
I was one of almost 50,000 spectators in the stadium with millions more across the globe watching the game live on television.
Interesting thing is, the incident was not shown in replay on the two big screens in the stadium; at all. Everyone waited for it but it never came. FIFA was probably afraid that that the crowd was ready to burn the stadium to the ground had this erroneous decision been confirmed in the replay.
Point is that the people looked but the camera looked away. The camera looked away and it was as if it had never happened. It did not matter at all that the people were looking and were seeing what what was really happening and because they did not see it again, the whole incident was simply negated.
Now let’s apply this to another situation happening as we speak; the immense oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
At this point in time the dichotomy lies in the fact that the American Government is lambasting BP all over the show and making them jump, sit, roll-over and play dead (although not too dead) – this we see a lot of in the media.
What no-one sees, however, is the fact that the press has been constantly prevented from accessing the affected areas by the American Coast Guard, Navy and various sheriff’s departments in the region. These agencies are actively assisting BP in preventing any unauthorised media reporting on the scale and extent of the disaster.
The camera is being deliberately pointed to create very specific and controlled images for public perception. The local residents whose lives have been utterly destroyed are looking, but all the cameras are looking away and the result is? The global population is largely unaware of the true profanity of this catastrophe.
The media columns in these areas to which I relate are generally regarded as being “free”; working in countries that are governed by constitutions, bills of rights etc, in which freedom of speech- and expression are well-enshrined. These countries are well-known democracies to boot.
The two examples I have mentioned here are not alone; there are many instances where the camera has simply looked away and taken large chunks of reality with it into obscurity.
Point of story is that no media anywhere in the world is free. All media everywhere in the world serves government and business in singuli in solidum – the people who pull your levers.
Don’t believe everything you hear (that one you know already), but also, start to wonder when you don’t hear anything about something. Or hear something else than what you think you should be hearing – Chances are someone, for some reason, is pulling your lever and making you look in the same direction as the camera.
Which is not necessarily where you should be looking in order to see the truth.
Time flies, days go by quickly and we forget even quicker. Until one day when something that you should have been aware of a long time ago comes up and bites you in the ass.
Then it’s too late – The camera will not come to your rescue. It does not care for you at all. It will simply look the other way and you will not exist any longer.
In the words of In the Colosseum by Tom Waits:
For the dead there is no story
No memory no blame
Their families shout blue murder
But tomorrow it’s the same
In the Colosseum
