There's something that has me really annoyed, which is the manipulation of information from the media.
In the present year we have been witnesses of all the disaster caused by the eartquake and the tsunami the past february, if we haven't been victims at all. We have seen destruction, pain and the worst side of our sellfish nature, watching the TV we have seen how some thieves stole flat screens and huge washing machines carrying them on their shoulders, but in a moment the media just concentrated their attention in this fact: the worst thing of all the chaos. The good actions and the donations don't sell well, and the drama is the best allied for sensacionalism. The horrible stories about how a woman lost her child in the first wave or the people who watched how their houses were carryed away by the sea, soon weren't enough. The media have used the information to have better sales, not to give objective information...
The days after this events, I stayed in front of the TV all day long, trying to know anything about other places affected, the people rescued, the campaigns to make money for those people, etc. Then, I felt a little depressed, I didn't have any damages in my house or my family, we were all OK, but I had the feeling that the news were not enough for my thirst of knowledge about this matter, I have family all across the country,I needed to know that they were OK too, I didn't have any signal in the phone, neither the cellphone, and the news only showed despair everywhere...
A few days later, we recovered the phone service and the thing started to ring all day long, many relatives called desperated wanting to know if we were alive and well, and so we were. My family also made a lot of calls to other relatives and friends, and fortunetly they were all fine, some people had damages in their houses but they were all OK.
The next days I stopped watching TV, I was tired of all the horror that the press spred like a virus, I know that was a disaster and many people needed to claim for help, but I think that the ambient that the media created those days wasn't appropiate for a country that needed to wake up. It was the ads, with a commercial interest, what started with a message of hope and revival spreading all the national TV channels. Banks that ask for donations, and things like that, started to make me sick: why not to make a real TV campaign exent of money interests? it's always the same condition: money behind every good action.
The lasts terrible events, I mean of course the miners trapped in the mine in the north of the country and all the attempts to rescue them, have captured the screens and averted the sights to this event in particular. At the same time, in the south of the country, some mapuche people were in the middle of a hunger strike, weak and undefended, and the authorities want to take advantage of this matter and force them to get some food by their veins, I mean, injecting it in them. The mapuche people want their rights to be respected and their lands back, but they haven't been listened by the authorities and that's because they started this hunger strike. It's very important to know that this events have occured in this days, but the miners has been a matter that doesn't blame the government directly, unlike the mapuche people's matter. The media doesn't even shows this matter, but it's very interested in the miners's matter. Very strange uh?
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