You are somalia of 31/B pentasa height , vaishali you are disturbed by the manner in which the media sensationalizes news items without verifying it authenticity. You express your feeling about this trend by writing a letter to the editor of national daily newspaper
Answers
Explanation:
A Somali community in the north of England is using the power of the press to beat the media at its own game. Sick of seeing negative headline after negative headline they decided to publish Sasca News, their own bilingual newspaper, to bring the community closer together.
Many Somalis felt – and still feel – that their portrayal in certain sections of the media as “scroungers” or criminals is grossly unfair and totally unrepresentative. It is not difficult to see why they might not see Britain as the most welcoming country to take refuge in.
As recently as December one newspaper reported how a Somali family had been “given a £2m council house in an exclusive London neighbourhood”. Other examples include: “Mother of girl, 16, who was raped in hotel by three Somali men tells how the attackers’ relatives terrified her throughout the trial” and “How Somalian men are living by their own law".
To counter these negative stories, the Somali Voices Project was set up by The Media Trust to show a more balanced picture of the Somali community in the UK – currently numbering in the region of 30,000 in Manchester alone.
Combine this with poverty, lower life chances, poor housing and the additional obstacle of a language barrier and you hear the background noise of odds being stacked against you.
Emergency journalism
In the face of such an onslaught from the mainstream media, and in the absence of a national Somali newspaper, a group of Somalis in Manchester decided to fight back with their own headlines. This is not citizen or community journalism – it is emergency journalism.
The newspaper came together with the help of (Sasca), the Somali Adult Social Care Agency, a charity based in south Manchester which offers advice on jobs, housing education, welfare and benefits. Sasca approached the journalism department at Manchester Metropolitan University to see if it could help in setting up the bilingual community newspaper.
Sasca News is a 12-page paper printed twice a year with the help of journalism students. All stories are published in English and Somali and the paper is “flip designed” to be read from front cover to centre, with six pages of content mirrored in both languages.