Very often, without realizing we are being manipulated, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested. Many times, false or one-sided knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance.
It all began when Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar took a dig at the mainstream US media including The Washington Post, for their ‘biased’ coverage of India. He was addressing a gathering of Indian Americans from across the country. Amidst laughter and applause, the minister was further asked about the misrepresentation of the Kashmir issue in the United States.
He asked,
“If there is a terrorist incident, if does not matter what faith the person who’s killed belongs to,” he replied. “How often do you hear people talking about it; pronouncing it, in fact, look at the media coverage. What does the media cover, what does the media not cover? [sic]”
He asserted, this is how opinions and perceptions are shaped. The minister further cited an example of Article 370 issue and said,
“What was a temporary provision of the Constitution was finally put to rest this was supposed to be an act of majority. This was supposed to be majoritarian. Tell me what was happening in Kashmir was not majoritarian? I think the way facts are slanted; things are laid out. What is right, and what is wrong is confusing. This is actually politics at work.”
This global phenomenon of superficial understanding of India needs a deeper analysis for it is not limited to the writers of Sluga Naroda but extends to global thought leaders and opinion makers, such as Francis Fukuyama, among others. Fukuyama’s recent remarks on liberal democracy and India betray a similar lack of understanding of India, a theme one consistently observes in the op-ed columns and editorial observations of Western publications such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Most commentary and analysis in India about this phenomenon have painted much of the Western media with a broad brush of editorial bias on account of the left-liberal leanings of journalists and editors.
Little attention has been paid to an in-depth analysis of global media coverage of India that appeared in the 56th edition of The Communicator, the peer-reviewed Journal of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication published in October-December of 2021. The report, titled “An Analysis of Global Media Coverage of Events in India” by Amol Parth, undertook an in-depth review of more than 3,000 India-related articles carried out by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Guardian. Further sampling a subset of 500 articles, the analysis found a consistent pattern of emphasizing political controversies in India with sensational headlines and keywords such as: hate, fear, violence, riot, mob, Hindu, and Kashmir. An interesting insight from the report was how the negative feedback loop from India-centric controversies created a perverse incentive for Indian-origin journalists and writers to contribute superficially written articles on controversial subjects to global media outlets, which tend to pay substantially more than their Indian media counterparts.
Not just in terms of India, but of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also, media bias has been a persistent issue. Whether on the ground or from a distance, reporting on this complex and sensitive topic can be challenging due to the deeply rooted historical, political, and religious factors involved. Terror groups inside and outside of Israel know this and take full advantage to sway public opinion. As a result, coverage is often selective, stories get framed in a misleading way, or certain perspectives go missing. But instead of focusing on Israel’s efforts to thwart terrorists, confiscate weapons, and prevent more civilian deaths, some major media outlets characterized Israel’s targeted attacks against terrorists as attacks on innocent and beleaguered Palestinians – feeding an unequivocally false narrative.
Every single year, about 600,000 people are reported missing in America. That number comes from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons database. In 2022, roughly 34,000 of those reported actively missing were people of color. But missing people of color often don’t get the same kind of intense media attention as certain cases of missing white people. Typically, law enforcement, with taxpayer dollars, would help with that search. But often when a person of color goes missing, their families have to raise funds on their own to help find their missing loved one.
Another such example is a sea of differences in the media coverage of the Titanic touring sub and the migrant boat tragedy. It did not need an elder statesman of America to point out the scandalous contrast between the intense media coverage of the Titanic’s doomed voyage and the almost cursory attention paid to the deaths of possibly hundreds of people off the coast of Greece just days earlier. Still, when Barack Obama did just that at a public forum in Athens on Thursday, his comments not only struck a responsive chord with the audience but also gave voice to the pent-up frustrations of news consumers worldwide.
“There is a potential tragedy unfolding with a submarine that is getting minute-to-minute coverage all around the world, and it is understandable because, obviously, we all want and pray that those folks are rescued,” the former US president said in the Greek capital, where he was attending a conference on child and adolescent mental health initiatives. While international media outlets went big on close-ups, names, and life stories of the five “explorers,” as described by the submersible’s operator OceanGate, the world got to see at best blurry images of a mass of migrants in distress as their ship capsized, the latest in a long line of tragedies that have turned the Mediterranean Sea into a veritable graveyard of people fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries.
“But the fact that that has gotten so much more attention than 700 people who sank — that is an untenable situation. The ‘juxtaposition of the two events’ has brought to the public’s attention this contrast of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims.”
– Halabi, the author of “Radical Hospitality,” which examines media coverage of immigration
Knowledge is power, they say. But what if that knowledge is a half-baked, half-truth version of the reality that surrounds us? We live in an era that allows us to access information with an ease our ancestors never had. The wealthy and powerful know this fact. Historically, the oppressed were kept powerless by being denied access to it; now they are kept so by being fed false and connived narratives of their own circumstances.