The Devil’s craft is to use deception and rule forever as a God. I am sure this phrase is common to some readers. For millennia, the Devil has always lured mankind to present himself as the True God.
The gullible ignorant majority fall for the trick and indeed praise and worship him. It is harder for Ugandans to know that the media campaigns that are reaching their inbox on a daily basis are a pre meditated strategy to breed contempt and hatred among people. People die and conspiracies are formed around their death, standing in the way of justice.
Journalists in Uganda and the media at large are being used and more targeted to create chaos and destabilize the country. What is sad is that some of them have fallen prey to criminals and foreign forces. They are entangled and have no way out, since they can’t pay back up to the expectations. They then take on to recruit young university students and desperate youth to relay propaganda and misinformation to the public.
Lured by huge sums of money from countries and international organizations that intend to cause a complete state distraction, some youth are being brain washed and encouraged join forces with the people fighting their own country peace. In my opinion that’s like testing a gun with its muzzle pointing to your head. It’s a gamble that involves shooting yourself dead.
Foreign enemies are recruiting disparate youth and blinding them from realizing the potential and opportunities the government has put in place for them. They are running for quick money deals. They are killing themselves over who takes what from the incentives of the enemies of Uganda.
They are misleading and have lost focus of who the real enemy is. Deception is successfully being used on them. Lately, some of them have learnt of these facts and the criminals who hide under the pretext of opposition have started to kill them.
To the ordinary innocent citizens who care about running their business and only consume news as it comes are being fed with misinformation and propaganda. My mentor once told me that what a person constantly tells you, you start to conceive as true. The media Magic bullet theory also states that people perceive information in the media as true without question. This is what the content creators with intention to subject people to hatred and discontent are basing on. But the public needs to know that the media should instead have a corporate social responsibility to inform the public with true facts and not to misinform.
One wonders whether some Ugandans are deliberately communing with the adversary to destabilize the nation through the media. As the trends indicate that peoples trust in main stream media is declining, instead of the journalists taking on the social media to dispel the falsehoods propagated in social media, they instead further report on the falsehoods without crosschecking back and forth.
As the overall media landscape has changed, there have been several ominous developments. Rather than using digital tools to inform people and elevate civic discussion, some individuals have taken advantage of social and digital platforms to deceive, mislead, or harm others through creating or disseminating fake news and disinformation.
Fake news is generated by outlets that masquerade as actual media sites but promulgate false or misleading accounts designed to deceive the public. When these activities move from sporadic and haphazard to organized and systematic efforts, they become disinformation campaigns with the potential to disrupt campaigns and governance in the entire country. It should be the role of the Media ‘the fourth estate’ as they like to call themselves to eliminate the misinformation with the right records and factual researched events.
False information is dangerous because of its ability to affect public opinion. The enemy of the country employs repetition and social pressure to influence and affect information flows to an extent to that misinformation is taken seriously by the audience. An example is the recent death of the young musician Ziggy Wine. The Media instead of employing resources to find out how People Power gone bad deals are leading to the death of their own members, it’s taking on the sentiments and propaganda of the criminals and reporting it as though it were credible. I maintain that the media owners must refocus their journalists to get off armed chair journalism and cast themselves to digging up facts that will enhance development and peace of the Nation.
