It appears that David Petraeus GS ’87, who seemed poised to be Princeton’s next president, has definitely been ruled out as a potential successor to Shirley Tilghman. His extramarital affair is not something revolutionary — sex scandals happen in politics all too often — but his position as director of the CIA raises many suspicions regarding national security, especially in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi. As more details about the story are being released, it is quickly becoming apparent there is much more to this scandal than simply an affair.
Unfortunately, many people seem to have formed conclusions based on the inconclusive evidence and facts we have at the moment. We supposedly have all the information, but then again, that’s what most people probably thought immediately following Petraeus’ resignation — that this was just another cut-and-dried case of a politician having an affair. I talked with my friends about it, read some online articles about it and perused comments sections to see what sorts of opinions people were gravitating toward; it seems everybody has heard slightly different versions of the story. Though that assertion is based on essentially anecdotal evidence, I think it is true very few people know the whole story behind Petraeus’ affair right now.
The development of online social media has contributed greatly to the ease with which public sentiment, such as disapproval of Petraeus’ actions, emerges over current events; it used to be that gossip would make its way quickly around a neighborhood or school if anything shocking happened, and now the Internet allows the same sort of dissemination to occur much faster and among a much larger population. However, just as rumors heard through the schoolyard grapevine were rarely accurate, the rapid spread of news and opinions on the Internet often results in people forming biased views based on incomplete facts. The whole process is essentially just a giant game of telephone with millions of participants, so some information is bound to be lost or distorted along the way.
As college students, we are possibly the demographic most vulnerable to this type of misinformation. It is very convenient to read news on the Internet; for many people, online news has completely replaced print media. It is hard enough to keep up-to-date on news in general here in the Orange Bubble, but without online media, I think many Princeton students would not bother keeping up with current events at all, and most colleges experience some degree of isolation from the outside world. As it is, I know many of my friends and I at Princeton will often hear about an important current event, such as the Petraeus scandal, from our classmates before we see it on the news ourselves. I know there are some of us that don’t even bother to check the news ourselves if we heard about something from a friend, even though that hearsay could be completely false.
Even if we do fact-check our friends with online media, we must remember our sources are driven by advertising — even reputable sources must compete for the money of advertisers because access is essentially free, so headlines and articles are often highly sensationalized. Ideally, we should try to read articles or listen to broadcasts about the same event from multiple different sources, and foreign sources provide the best contrast to our domestic media. The differences in the coverage of the same event by the BBC, Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press are usually pretty significant, and the influence of domestic politics is often apparent. Even among the different American media outlets, the coverage of the Petraeus scandal has been quite varied. Some biases are well known to most Americans — for example, Fox News is widely acknowledged as conservative, while MSNBC is liberal.
My point is that many of us Princeton students — and the American public in general — are too busy most of the time to read the same piece of news from different sources or do any kind of fact-checking. The Petraeus affair is just the latest example of a current event we don’t know much about, yet many of us have already formed our opinions on various aspects of the story and related political issues. Instead, we should take a step back and wait for news stories to unfold further before passing judgment.
Spencer Shen is a freshman from Houston, Texas. He can be reached at szshen@princeton.edu.
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