.png)
Biased and untruthful news reports have always been around, but it wasn’t until the recent war on Gaza that people began to wake up and start questioning their morning newspaper.
The method in which today’s news outlets report has created a bubble around their readers, formed from biased reporting and hero-complex storylines.
Bias
No matter what news source one reads, it’s likely biased. That’s human nature, but it’s also something people fail to consider when they’re reading their morning newsletters.
For years, people have trusted news sources explicitly. But as partial and prejudiced news outlets began to form, so did the divide between fact and fear-based reporting. Not every news source is the culprit. But in recent years, individuals have been able to seek solace in their chosen news networks. If you try hard enough, you’ll find someone who agrees with you and is saying exactly what you want to hear.
Nationalized News
The war in Gaza has shown some of the most biased news reporting to date.
The Americanized/Westernized coverage of the Israel/Gaza war demonstrates the problems a biased news source brings. And the weighted view of Israel has put blinders on the American and Canadian people – we’re looking at you New York Times.
Ironically, the war in Gaza has spotlighted a bigger fight — the war on misinformation.
Instead of reporting on the facts, journalists peppered their articles with buzzwords like ‘apartheid,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and ‘genocide.’ These words painted a violent picture of a war, but they only reported about the violence on one side. American reporters have failed to report on this war through an unbiased lens. Instead, we hear about the atrocities happening on one side, and silence on the other.
Under the Influence
Can’t trust the news? Now what? The Pew Research Center found about one-third of adults get their news from TikTok. This percentage has quadrupled since 2020.
Social media highlights informative voices and powerful calls to action from a different perspective that many of us have seen. Apps like TikTok provide a personalized and unfiltered outlook on the war we can't get anywhere else.
In 2023, we saw a live-streamed war.
TikTok users saw mothers and daughters reuniting with their families in real-time. We watched a teenage girl walking in her newly bombed neighbourhood. The world tuned into a father’s live-stream of his family’s bomb shelter.
We didn’t hear about these stories from a third-hand reporter. We watched them live. These personalized videos tore down the fourth wall of professionalism and biased media and just showed the facts. TikTok took a war on a news page and turned it into everyone’s battle. Creators raised funds for the Palestinian people. They created boycott lists and monetized sounds for the victims of this war.
Social media called out the misinformation that most major news outlets were spreading. War is not just a video you can choose to scroll past. It's reality. So they post and share their story because no one else will. Social media provides that perspective news outlets haven't successfully showcased for some time – It shows the truth.
What a world we live in when social media is the truth-bringer.
The Solution
It’s difficult to draw a line in the sand when it comes to learning who to trust as your news source.
The solution isn’t to negate these resources but to diminish the power you give them. Lies and falsehoods can only be vanquished with one thing: the truth.
It’s on us to do the proper research before we spout off facts about the genocide happening in Gaza. We need to read more than one source before we consider ourselves experts on a topic we just learned about five minutes ago. Maybe the true experts are the ones who can sit quietly on the side and let the people who need to share their stories speak. And when they see fake information, they can stand up against it.
In a world full of self-centered and biased reporters, we don’t need to add another voice to the masses. Instead, we need a reckoning .
What if we can make something as simple as checking the news and outlets for growth? What if we thought to expand our horizons, our borders and our knowledge through every resource we read?