As UNESCO marks Global Media and Information Literacy Week, Moulana Uwais Dockrat argues that Muslims must look beyond misinformation and critically examine the worldviews, values and identities shaping the media they consume.
Imagine a runaway trolley hurtling towards five people trapped on the tracks. A man stands beside a lever. Pulling it will divert the trolley onto another track, where one person stands. He has seconds to decide: allow five people to die, or intervene and cause one death.
He pulls the lever. Five survive. One dies.
Two media outlets report the same event.
“HERO SAVES FIVE LIVES IN SPLIT-SECOND DECISION.”
“MAN DELIBERATELY DIVERTS TROLLEY, KILLING INNOCENT BYSTANDER.”
One audience sees a hero. The other sees a killer. The same man. The same decision. The same facts. Yet one report invites applause; the other demands condemnation.
This is the trolley problem, a moral dilemma. It also reveals the power of media framing.
As UNESCO marks Global Media and Information Literacy Week from 24 to 31 October, we should carefully examine the assumptions through which we are taught to interpret information. Recognising a fabricated story matters. Recognising the worldview embedded within a credible story matters too.
Media selects. Editors decide which events deserve attention, whose suffering becomes urgent, which voices count as authoritative and what belongs in a headline. These decisions carry judgements about human beings, morality and power. Calling that process neutral conceals the worldview operating within it.
Media literacy must therefore reach into three connected areas: worldview, values and identity.
A worldview supplies the lens through which events become meaningful. Words such as “progress”, “freedom” and “oppression” carry assumptions about what human beings are and how they ought to live. If individual autonomy is treated as the highest good, obedience to divine authority can be presented as a problem from the outset. Muslims should recognise that judgement as an ideological position, however confidently it is presented as common sense.
Then comes the value system. What are we being taught to celebrate, condemn, desire or dismiss? Coverage that measures success through wealth teaches a lesson about worth. Coverage that rewards shamelessness with admiration teaches another. Repeated exposure can make those judgements feel natural, even when they contradict what we profess to believe.
Finally, there is identity. Every ideal we celebrate suggests a person worth becoming. Is the admired figure wealthy, famous and answerable only to personal desire? Or courageous, truthful, responsible and conscious of Allah? A Muslim may consume religious reminders while absorbing an entirely different understanding of success from the rest of his daily media diet.
This places a serious responsibility on Muslim media. Adding Islamic terminology to imported assumptions will leave those assumptions intact. Our reporting should begin from an Islamic understanding of truth, justice and human purpose. Revelation must guide our moral judgements, including when commercial interests, political loyalties or popular trends pull in other directions.
Our task is to awaken understanding, mobilise responsible action and unite people through shared responsibility. Reporting should help readers recognise injustice, understand their obligations and respond with knowledge and principle. Outrage that produces only another angry scroll achieves little. Neither does unity built on refusing to confront our own failures.
Readers share this responsibility whenever they open an article or forward a message. Alongside checking the source and evidence, they should ask what the coverage assumes, whose perspective it excludes, what it encourages them to admire and whether its moral standards survive when applied to its own allies.
This week, Muslims should examine the lens as carefully as the facts. Whoever supplies our definitions of progress, dignity and success gains influence over our aspirations. We owe ourselves, our children and our community something better than borrowed judgements dressed as neutrality. We need media that serves truth, cultivates conscience and helps us understand our responsibilities before Allah.
