Dr Bratt's recent article entitled Things I like about T&T has indirectly hit the nail on the head as to what is perhaps wrong with our media and their effect on our society as a whole.
You, more so than most others, would appreciate what the effect would be on a child who is continuously bombarded by negative images of himself or herself. That child is our young nation and the negative images are the day-in, day-out negative images fed to the nation, to us, about ourselves, especially to the youth and less discerning citizens by all our media–newspapers, TV, radio, social media–as the latest news about ourselves.
God really must be a Trini for us to be able to live here at all, with generations having been brought up with all these negative self images of ourselves and our society, and very little positive self images to guide and focus us on.In fact it would seem the more media we have–reflections of ourselves–the worse our society gets. It is almost as though the media are involved in a conspiracy to make our society unliveable as it fast seems to be becoming.
Psychologists have said that there seems to be a correlation between the number of horror movies one watches and the occurrence of nightmares. We seem to be living our nightmare and our horror movies are catching up with us as a society.
Is it not strange that for all that was negative about our colonial past, it seems to have been our golden age? Maybe the "colonial" media were more sensible then than the media are now–or is it that "our media" have sacrificed long-term society-building, through ignorance of their role and responsibility in a society perhaps, for short-term sensationalism and mud raking profits–to the detriment of us all.
Be that as it may, thank you for a very thought provoking article.
Kelvin Samuel
via e-mail