I’ve always been a big believer in the impartiality and fairness of the media. Like my belief in Father Christmas, it was something that I kept going for a long time and never wanted to let go of. However, in the past few years, I have come to realise more and more that everyone has an agenda and that in this post-truth world, it really does pay to look at multiple sources before coming to any kind of conclusion.
Let’s take this latest Blake Lively case, for example. For those of you who don’t know, Blake Lively is an actress who has starred in multiple films and series. In the almost 30 years she has been working, I don’t think I had ever seen a single negative comment about her until her latest film, It Ends With Us.
I’m not her number-one fan or anything like that, but I confess I was a little surprised by how many negative short videos, articles, and comments mushroomed all over the internet as soon as the film was released. To use the Gen Z term that now many have come to understand, it started to feel like Blake Lively was being cancelled.
Now, four months after the film’s release date, in a life-imitates-art situation, I’ve woken up to the news that Blake Lively is suing director and star Justin Baldoni for sexual harassment. In itself, this would be bad enough, but now private messages have come to light detailing an alleged campaign to tarnish the actress’s reputation after she accused Baldoni of misconduct on set. The chilling line written by crisis management expert Melissa Nathan to reassure a publicist working with the studio that Lively could indeed be taken down is straight out of a film script: “You know we can bury anyone.”
It’s super strange to think that all those damaging videos and articles popping up everywhere were engineered to literally bury Lively’s career. Super strange and super scary. Yes, at the time, it felt weird to see so many destructive things written about someone who had never really seemed to antagonise anyone till that point, but like everyone else, I sat there and consumed the hate and perhaps allowed it to change my opinion of someone that I don’t know.
With AI growing stronger and an abundance of fake news, we can no longer take for granted that we are being told the truth just because multiple edited videos all claim the same thing. This means that we need to get better at asking the right questions and not being so quick to pass judgment on situations we don’t know anything about.
The reality is that if this could happen to Blake Lively, it could happen to anyone. Perhaps keep that in mind the next time you feel justified in writing something not-so-nice while riding a wave of someone else’s hate.