2009 Plain English Speaking Award Finalists' Speeches
Sasha Skinner - Toorak College, Mt Eliza
Media vs Reality
What would you think if you heard: ‘Traumatised mother terrified for daughters safety’, ‘Doctor prescribes dangerous drug’?
A Moonee Ponds mother is suing her 16-year-old daughter’s doctor for prescribing the teenager antidepressants linked to suicidal tendencies.
She alleges that Doctor Vanessa Haller deliberately misrepresented and falsely promoted Zoloft as the drug of choice for teenagers with depressive symptoms. Her daughter, an A-grade student, became violent and tried to commit suicide twice after she was prescribed Zoloft for depression last August.
Who would have thought that the doctor was the victim?
Media – the greatest influence today. Information is delivered by the media that cannot be received personally; hence our perceptions of issues raised are entirely based on the media.
The media has moved on and is no longer a means of communication, but is now purely a money-making scheme, making decisions regardless of problems they may cause.
In the instance mentioned earlier the doctor, and powerless victim of media misrepresentation, was in fact my mother.
My mother is a highly esteemed doctor. She spends countless nights making home visits to patients and friends in need. She would do anything for anyone if they asked.
A few years ago I had clinical anxiety and depressive symptoms. I was, with my mother’s knowledge, prescribed the same drug, Zoloft. Would my mother have allowed this to happen if Zoloft really had ‘serious side effects’ and led to ‘suicidal tendencies’? Of course not, yet if all the information you had received was from the media, this is what you would believe. And do you know what’s even worse; my mother had no way of protecting her reputation and defending herself with the truth, due to patient confidentiality. However, the media chose to instead claim that she ‘refused to comment’.
In this obvious example we see how the media distorts news, distorting reality. As you can see, it all comes down to how they tell the story. By disproportionably representing different sides of a story and choosing their wording, the media is able to bend the truth.
Refugees are a prime example of this disproportional representation. Here are a few of the countless myths presented by the media.
Australia is facing a flood of refugees
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, 8.4 million refugees applied to migrate to the industrialised world. European countries received 75 per cent of these. Australia, New Zealand and Japan together received just over 1 per cent. Hardly a flood.
All refugees arrive in Australia by boat
This is ludicrous. Each year a maximum of 22 per cent of refugees have arrived in Australia via boat. That’s not even a quarter.
It is unnerving to see just how the media can alter our perceptions of the truth by feeding us information they want us to hear and doing so in such a warped fashion. However, it is not only what they say, it’s what they don’t say!
How many people do you think have died in the Iraq war? Two thousand? Three thousand? Maybe even four thousand? What if I was to say the real statistic on reported casualties are around 160 thousand, and the true figure estimated to be over 600 thousand. So where do we think the figures closer to two to four thousand come from? That’s the approximate number of US soldier casualties … interesting …
At first we might be quite confused as to why the media would go to such lengths to distort reality. However, it doesn’t take Einstein to figure that one out. What are newspapers and current affairs programs interested in? Sales! The newspapers want you to buy their newspaper, and the current affairs shows want to up their ratings. How do they do this? Well they do just what we’ve seen them do … they tell, or should I say make, stories.
In a world of growing technological advances, the media is increasing its influence dramatically through a widening variety of forms. We must remain guarded and be prepared to question what is spoon fed to us. It is inevitable that the media will affect our opinions in some way, but if you take anything out of my speech today let it be awareness. Thankfully my mother has now recovered from the scandal that not only threatened her livelihood, but diminished her self confidence. But don’t let the media completely distort your reality.