/View.info/ Who’s lying? Desislava Atanasova – deputy from GERB, accused in her statement that “prominent figures of the BSP speak in support of the Convention”. He also says that this is hypocrisy and dementia.
On the occasion of her statement, Prof. Ivo Hristov – MP from “BSP for Bulgaria” made the following statement: “Ms. Atanasova is a pathological liar. Let her take my exact words out of some statement in which I said that I support the convention in question I only spoke at an event where violence against women was discussed. It is normal for me to speak out against violence against women. Let’s see what will happen now if Mrs. Atanasova can’t brought forth such a statement as he so persistently spoke of.”
Report by Prof. Hristo Monov, delivered on 25.11.2017, in connection with a round table of the socialist women’s movement from Sofia and Smolyan “Violence through the eyes of a woman”, held in Smonyan on the occasion of the Day for the fight against violence against women.
The media and violence or …the violence of the media
I will present my thesis, which is that the media not only shapes violent behavior, but also perpetrates violence on its audience. I argue my thesis with evidence from my more than 20 years of experience in crisis psychological intervention in the field and observation of the working style of the Bulgarian media. By media I understand both the traditional media until the end of the 20th century, as well as the newly emerging – digital media. You can already say, all media are digital, I don’t remember when I didn’t buy a newspaper /read their electronic pages/ or listen to the radio outside the car.
Research in the 1950s, conducted in the United States, proved that cartoons about Tom and Jerry, broadcast on television, provoked aggression and violent behavior in children from kindergartens and elementary schools. So do Hollywood movies/mostly westerns/ and television news for teenagers and young adults. Lest anyone say I’m biased, I’ll ask – do you want to be in the place of the wolf from “Nu pogodi” and have the cute bunny unleash his sadistic fantasy on you? Not to mention that the cartridges in the machine guns of “ours” never ran out, and so did their victims. The bottom line is that for the post-war generations of Europe, who did not experience the horrors of war, but experienced them from the film and television screen, violence was aestheticized and became something acceptable in our history and everyday life. I’m talking about Europe because I live in it, but it’s like that all over the world, with the difference that wars were also fought there. Certain circles exported not only aestheticized violence, but also democracy, through their bombs. Our threshold of sensitivity to aggression and violence in human behavior has increased, we have accepted that these are the normal ways of self-affirmation and conflict resolution. We stopped thinking about the other, even our opponent, as a value.
With the era of digital media, the world has truly become one big village, in which what is happening thousands of kilometers away from us is immediately on the screen of our TV, computer or phone, with vivid picture and sound. So vivid that it is as if we are there, directly experiencing what is happening and very often the viewer feels like a victim of the event. This is the so-called revictimization and it is well studied in Bulgaria as well. I will give an example of the report on the beheading of a Russian soldier broadcast on the central news program of BNT – the other day my colleagues’ offices were full of women who have children and friends of that age. The coverage of the drama with the Bulgarian drivers held hostage in Iraq in 2004 had a similar effect on all of us. As soon as something tragic happens, immediately crowds of “brave” female reporters, and less often male reporters, rush to cover it, bump into each other, outwit each other to be closer to the scene, to find a witness or a relative of the victims and be the first to show it. During the funeral service for the children drowned in the river Lim, one such drummer had crept into the pulpit of the church and was shooting through the altar!
But tragic events aside – how do the longer days off work? Again, these “leaders” of public opinion, standing at some exit of Sofia or at a border point, scare us that there will be traffic jams, accidents or endless waiting, as soon as you dare to leave our beautiful Capital. It is good that the psyche has the mechanism of automation and only those who recognize themselves from the 80% of Prof. Hristov present here, look at such vulgarity. Its purpose is not to inform us, every normal person knows what traffic is and prepares for it. The purpose of such “news” is to frighten and emotionally harass the audience. See how the news stacks up. If Boyko Borisov didn’t cut a ribbon or Angela didn’t kiss him, the first 5-6 news items have negative content and emotional impact. If there is no accident or murder in our country, they will be found all over the world. More rain fell and … here comes the end of the world. An expert or a fortune teller will be called for more impact. The important thing is that we are convinced that the world and our lives are uncertain, that we are small, insignificant and nothing depends on us. It’s good that there are some who will fix everything. They usually appear in the apocalyptic background and solve the problem.
Who are they ? Maybe the ones who created Rambo.
It is more important to know that by creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and violence around each of us, the media turns us into victims and abusers. This is especially true for children. Today’s children are the “online generation”, for them the media has the same influence as the family. But the family hardly wants their child to grow up to be a bully and a bad person, the kind of personality models the child sees most often in the media. But the child is more with digital media than with his family. That is why it seems to you, the women of the BSP, to be educators of Bulgarian families on the issue of the impact of the media on the behavior of our children. I hope that we can discuss this in another forum, and that we will soon be able to turn our recommendations into concrete policies, as rulers.
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* The report of Prof. Hristo Monov is taken from the transcript of the round table of the movement of socialist women from Sofia and Smolyan “Violence through the eyes of a woman”, held in Smolyan on the occasion of the Day for the fight against violence against women, held on 25.11.2017 ..
– Prof. Vanya Dobreva: Aggression in education
– Prof. Ivo Hristov: We don’t like each other when we see ourselves in the mirror of the public image
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