CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA

smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.” He also writes: “Plane crashes always make the news, but car crashes, which kill far more people, almost never do. Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. People rank tornadoes (which kill about 50 Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than 4,000 Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television.” What we ask of the press is that it should attach importance to real value, not to news value. Attaching importance to real value makes one realistic, and realism is the source of all human virtues. Attaching importance to news value, on the other hand, leads to insincerity, and insincerity is, without doubt, the cause of all human evils. The press can play an important role in the sincere and constructive society. But at present, it is proceeding in a direction quite contrary to this aim. Islam seeks to train people to attach importance to realities. While on a foreign trip, I met a gentleman from Canada. He asked me the meaning of Islam. “Islam means realism,” I replied. In fact, Islam is the science of life, and this science is founded on the principle that one should be a realist in this world; in every matter, one should adopt a realistic attitude which is the secret to every success in life, and lack of realism is the prime cause of all failure. In the present age, there are two departments which are particularly important in fashioning life. These two departments are science and journalism. Science is connected more to the physical world and journalism to the human world. Science studies events in the universe, and journalism deals with the events in the world of man. But the strange thing is that these two departments are at severe odds with one another. Science is founded fully on realistic principles; it proceeds in compliance with the reality that there is a world outside us that rests solidly on firm laws. Water, for instance, has a law of its own; so does land, and so does the atmosphere. Ships come into being by virtue of conformance Attaching importance to real value makes one realistic, and realism is the source of all human virtues.