Waging a new type of war: a media war

If you’re anything like me, then you like to get your news from the ranks of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and “The Onion.”

But I’m not the only one. For myriad people under the age of 30, Jon Stewart’s reliability as a news source is comparable to CNN, Fox News and NPR, and sadly, this comes as no surprise in an age where disillusionment with the media has plagued our generation.

The recent barrage of reporting-gone-wrong has quite possibly marred the media’s credibility irrevocably. Media bias has become the norm with discernible bias in the entities interviewed, facts cited, headlines, scenes portrayed in photographs and trending hashtags.

For example, #iftheygunnedmedown —that is, the social media campaign that raises the question, “If they gunned me down, what picture of me would the media show to the public?” was spurred by perceived media bias in the portrayal of Michael Brown in the media. It became a subject of contention in that the media chose a photograph of him in which he’s throwing up a peace sign, but which many would inevitably perceive as a gang sign. He had a plethora of everyday pictures, yet the media made the conscious decision of posting that one. Incensed masses took to Twitter, tweeting normal, innocuous pictures of themselves juxtaposed with pictures that could be interpreted as questionable, similar to the one of Michael Brown, with the hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown.

Now compare the titles of different articles —CNN’s “Israel Shoots Palestinians” and the Associated Press’s “Palestinian kills baby at Jerusalem station.” The nuances of both titles present undeniable media bias toward either side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. While the U.S. media has historically cast greater credence to Israel, today the media has been casting greater credence to Palestine in the ongoing “media war,” according to Vox and as is evident by the recent allegations against AP of bias against Israel in its reporting.

Then there’s simply biased reporting. As The Washington Post recounts, the writer of Rolling Stone’s piece about the alleged gang rape of a freshman specifically picked the University of Virginia and the fraternity Phi Kappa Psi. Her rationale is entrenched in stereotype, purporting that the frat is “really emblematic in a lot of ways of sort of like elitist fraternity culture.”

As writer Alexandra Petri pointed out in an article about the media’s newfound role in Ferguson, we need the media “to tell the story that does matter.” All of these stories undoubtedly matter, and the people behind these stories are fully cognizant of the impact and salience they carry, from institutionalized racism to a ceaseless, casualty-ridden conflict to sexual assault on college campuses. But often the media will disproportionately cover one event or news story more than other current events, inevitably grossly oversimplifying the story and allowing bias to permeate the reporting, as it did with both Ferguson and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ferguson certainly hasn’t been the only incident of arguably racial violence, and the atrocities committed by both Israel and Hamas aren’t singular incidents in the Middle East.

The media should be an impartial, didactic force that seeks to pursue the truth, not to engender a twisted sense of ignorance. The media should more carefully scrutinize the picture of a victim that they are about to present. The media should be more judicious in titling articles. The media should realize that a certain degree of dubiety is necessary in trusting your sources and that corroborating your sources is crucial, even despite the interviewee’s will.

But then again, maybe the solution lies in where we seek our news in the first place. Local investigative reporting is an underrated asset in news today. We should read from a wide array of news sources, both domestic and international. Nonetheless, while a third-party source may be ostensibly unbiased, such as the United States commenting on the Middle East, Western reporting has presented biases of its own.

That being said, news necessitates objective reporting. Commentary and personal analysis are also integral to good journalism; that’s what op-eds and columns are for.

Mainstream media, particularly Western media coverage of the news, needs greater accountability. The role of mainstream media should not be to change the way we think, but rather to give us the information we need so that we may choose how to think. It should not be to compel us to adopt the source’s viewpoint, but rather to allow us to formulate our own stance on the issues.

The media is retrograding practically toward yellow journalism with sensationalist stories and unreasonably attention-grabbing headlines providing a biased, if not inaccurate, account. As the man infamously attributed to yellow journalism, William Randolph Hearst, said, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” And that is exactly the trend in the status quo —the media is furnished with pictures and stories, and in turn, they furnish conflict.

Sarah Sakha is a freshman from Scottsdale, Ariz. She can be reached at ssakha@princeton.edu.