

News to increase awareness

My experience with newspapers and media in India

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2 6

Written by DeletedUser

I spent an entire month visiting different cities in India last January. We reached New Delhi on the 15th, the day after another brutal attack to a tourist was reported. 

As a foreigner I always try not to judge the problematic affairs of other nations before trying to understand the context and how is that society working to build a solution. I learnt that dealing with my country news, having to complement my friends views from by international feeds, such as the ones provided by AP and EFE, a lot of times just translated by news publishers without providing the necessary background and perspective, failling to inform on the rush to fill the blanks of tomorrows edition.

Mass communication management will play a pivotal role on the absortion of any proposed solution, rissing and maintaining awareness while informing the obtained results. 

Some questions to animate the thinking prosses. Does the understanding of a situation differ if it happens on our backyard or on a remote country? How similar is the flow of information for different income-level populations? Are you aware of the number of aggressions received by women in other countries, or just about the details that reach you through the regular news, often just the ones with non-local victims?

This are the links of the news I read in the printed papers that day.

The Times of India
Danish tourist gang-raped, 2 arrested

Hindustan times
India shamed again: Danish woman gangraped in Delhi

And this is how CNN elaborated on the event internationally (video).
Horrific details of alleged gang rape


Join the conversation:

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Thanks Daniel for this inspiration.

First I found the video really interesting though I found it sad to hear all these women saying how unsafe they feel. I went only 2 days in India, in Hyderabad, to give a talk and could not get a sense of the place. In fact, interestingly when I asked to see the city, instead of being in the gated campus, people were surprised. They ended up putting me in a taxi for an hour. :-(

Second, I find your point about the news and the role of the media really interesting. I agree with you that they create a certain perspective that is often very different from what people in the country perceived. I remember living in Singapore during the SARS and my family and friends were terrorized while my life did not change much, except for the bummer of having to have my temperature check when going to work. :-)
You made a great point about the difference between international and local news but also the access to news that people in low-income communities might have.

One way to think about this is also about what are the media accessed and influential in various communities. See for example:

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Spaces like this platform are the perfect complement to build strong foundations to the ill-structured context news we encounter on a daily basis.
The contributors here are extremely aware of that need. Sometimes, however, the truth hides behind overwhelming amounts of data (447 posts and counting). Hopefully, the method used to move into the Ideas face will extract the best and allow us to take the most fruitful paths (or themes). Based on the trend I have seen, the transmission of information related to this problematic will certainly be included in those.