I have known for decades that there is no such thing as "objective" and "unbiased" when it comes to the media. Indeed, I strive to get "news" from rival sources with contradictory biases, knowing that each side will highlight the part of the news that ties into their bias and ignore the part of the news that doesn't. Even so, I caught myself one day having a viscerally negative reaction to a politician from a foreign country (i.e. not Nigeria) after months of reading relentlessly negative portrayals of that politician from variously biased news sources from the man's home continent.
What made these sources (from the "right" and the "left") dislike the man was his contrary opinion on one specific issue on which journalists from the "right" and "left" of this particular region agreed on. The thing is, the man had every right to have that opinion, and regardless of whether I agreed with him or not, the journalists' shared position was simply an ideological opinion and not an absolute truth.
To be honest, I didn't and don't have an opinion on the man, because I do not understand the man's language and hence have never heard (or read) him expressing his opinion in his own words, from his own mouth (or pen). Everything I have ever heard or learned about him came from the mouths and pens of people who dislike him because he doesn't share their opinion. They tend to caricature him as being stupid, looking stupid and talking stupid. I always made it a point to disregard the caricaturing, but one day, in one moment, after years of reading about him in the English-language media, I looked at a picture of him and the first thing that came to mind was he looked stupid.
I instantaneously caught myself, realized that for all my efforts to block out the propaganda, I had in fact been affected by it.
This video, pulled from Youtube, discusses how journalists, politicians and the media can subtly or openly influence and manipulate citizen perceptions of other peoples.
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