Two Sides to Pirate Stories: Are we being entertained or informed?

Richard Phillips and the Somali Pirates

No its not a movie or a baseball team.  But it has become a real life adventure with a thickening plot.

When American media gets hold of a story, it can change right before your eyes.  Even though there are two sides to every story, media will only deliver one depending on their target audience. 

In this plot, Phillips has been rescued. He was taken hostage from the hijacked freighter ship, the Maersk Alabama, off the coast of Somalia. However, questions with regards to mission of the pirates whether gangsters or rebels with a cause have now become the subject, not of the media, but of the back story circulating in real time.

Now that modern day pirates have captured America’s attention, some are looking for the rest of the story.  Media stores: 29,399 The rest of the story: 1,890,000

Recommended Buzz: Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live.” In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas. 

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