Media Imperialism (Critical Reflection1)

The documentary entitled "The Power of Nightmares (Part 3 - Shadow in the Cave)" by Adam Curtis was shown in class on Monday. How do you relate the information given to you in the documentary to the theory of Media Imperialism that we talked about in lecture?

The documentary is about how the power country (the rich and advance country like US) makes the world believe that terrorist is actively involving in crimes and state that vanish the "terrorist" is the correct way. However, the "terrorist" actually does not exist; in fact, it is just an assumption of the super power country. It is very obvious that the country has abused the power of media for their own purpose. Although there are small group of people who realise that this is not right, they cannot speak up their words as the media is dominated by the powerful country. This is similar to Media Imperialism.

From the documentary, I learn that media imperialism is very unfair to the weak as they are being force to obey and tolerance by the stronger rival; the stronger one can make whatever action and claim it as a correct act even it is wrong. Using the example from the documentary, the late President of America, Bush had announced that there was an active terrorist army, which involved in the 911 tragedy, located at somewhere around the Afghanistan. As we can see, through media imperialism, the Bush administration was able gain power and authority in the people. They control the media content by showing the people what the politicians consider as the truth. The truths were covered up while others were distorted or made up. Politicians created an illusion for themselves and a shadow enemy for America. For example in the Documentary, they told the world of the existence of a terrorist organization called Al Qaeda which is lead by Osama Bin Laden. The truth was actually there was no Al Qaeda. Bin Laden was merely a wealthy man who funded the operations of Islamist terrorist. They even added that this organization have operatives in more than 40 countries, while in reality, these terrorist are merely different groups of people fighting against regimes in their own countries. Besides, they also announced that terrorist intent to use dirty bombs to attack America. According to experts, actually such threats are of no concern because the radioactivity produced is not harmful to humans.

In my opinion, the US government practice media imperialism because as one of the world’s leading economic powerhouse, their actions are monitored by the world. Media imperialism is very unsafe and yet, not easy to block because the media has been controlled by developed countries and they are the only one who have the power to filter and choose what they want the public to think and know. In other words, only the strong country will have the ability to use “Media Imperialism” to control the whole world.