Mass Media Like a Mirror
(Original)

Alexandra Girel
(Age 10, Belarus)
School#4, Soligorsk

A modern person can't imagine himself without newspapers, radio, TV and the Internet. By means of mass media we learn about the events happening in different, even most remote parts of our planet.

The development of modern technologies has given people a chance to watch not only openings of film festivals and MTV rewarding ceremonies on the air, but also to be frightened speechless witnesses of terrible acts of terrorism. I was four years old when the terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in the USA. At that moment, watching TV together with my parents, I was too small to understand everything. What I did understand is that there was something very terrible. The older I get the more I feel the fear and pain of ordinary people captured in Moscow (in Dubrovka) and in Beslan.

Thanks to Mass Media all these human tragedies became my own. And my heart was aching when I saw the people carrying the burnt and exhausted Beslan schoolchildren on stretchers after they had been freed. Many of them were of my age. It was then when I understood how important the role of mass media in our life is.

Today I read and I hear about blood in Iraq and the war in Sector Gaza. All these help me to understand how fragile our world is. In one second can a monstrous tsunami make thousands of people vanish from the surface of the earth. A second and the terrorist will blow up a big shop in Turkey. And then the greatest desire appears to do the utmost for all people to live peacefully and appreciate each other's opinion. Please adults, politicians find the solution for peaceful coexistence and stop bleeding.

Of course mass media can play a very important role in it. With their help inhabitants of different countries can address to each other, unite and make the world better.

However not always mass media reflect truthfully the reality. Sometimes some editions, TV channels and Internet - sites call people for violence and cruelty, distribute pornography including children's, advertise activities of terrorist organizations and destructive sects. There should not be such mass media in our world, because they are directed against Man and destroy our world and lives.

Therefore, I think, that each journalist, each editor-in-chief, each producer is responsible for what we see, we hear and we read. Maybe it is high time we introduced a severe punishment for spreading hatred and wars by means of mass media.

Certainly, we should be better ourselves. Each person should live fairly, be merciful and respectable, and love the world and people around. And when we change the mass media will change as well. In fact they reflect our life like a mirror. The old Russian proverb says: "There is no point scolding a mirror if your face is curve."

Unfortunately many lacks of modern mass media are connected, first of all, with the fact that some of us want to see horrors and violence on screens and internet - sites.

Let's take such a problem as global warming. Ecologists have aroused the alarm about the irreversible changes of climate on the planet because of unreasonable activities of people who litter the atmosphere and the world ocean. And when human beings hear that the weather becomes abnormally hot or abnormally cold they start thinking it over. Of course, not everybody, but many start to live so as to not cause harm to nature.

We, people, should make everything to keep what we have. I believe that our world can be better. And by means of mass media we shall achieve it.