Does media speak the truth?
(Based on the article "Spilling blood with oil in Iraq" –6april2003)

Media exists in many different forms-newspapers, magazines, television, radios etc. It is the means of communication, which reach or influence people widely and hence it has the obligation to update us daily with the world’s happenings. But does the media always report the truth to us?

With the encouragement for the freedom of speech and their powerful command of English Language, today’s media frequently weave creative stories and present to us what they perceived over what is real. The information we received are only a part of the truth but when we zoom out our lens to take a look at the whole picture, we will often realize that we are misled by our innovating media.

The media is used as a tool by the government for propaganda purposes and the government will definitely not tolerate scandals or news that are of disadvantage to them. Eventually, it is understandable that media will only broadcast the glory of the government and make obscure reports on the mistakes made by government. With reference to the article "Spilling blood with oil in Iraq", my above stand is strongly supported.

As far as everyone knows, the Iraq war has sparked off as USA argued that Iraq is producing weapons of mass destruction. However, none of the arguments for war was substantiated from the start. There has been no weapons of mass destruction been found, so why does people still has the strong belief of the existence of such weapons? The phrase-"creative untruths" is used in the article to describe the news given to us by the reporters. From only two simple words, we can infer that media is not always trustworthy. They can lie. As quoted from the article, "Many Iraqi civilians have been crippled, traumatized and killed in 12 years of war", we can see that the usage of these words in bold have aroused our strong feelings towards the real situation in Iraq. We can eventually see the whole picture of this cruel reality through inference from these words- USA’s real motive of the Iraq war is to have full control of Iraqi oil. I believe only the minority is aware of this truth.To put it nicely, the media may have their restrictions or obligations to report a certain piece of information to the world and thus it is dependent on individuals whether or not to trust them in wholesale.

However, I personally feel that we should widen our scope and not just narrow our source of education to one. Only then, we will be able to look at things from different perspectives and eventually find our own conclusion to the issue.