How the stories shared during Writers’ Fortnight highlights modern media’s inherent problem
The Modern Newsroom (Credit: Flikr)
What struck me the most while listening to a speech given by criminal psychologist Christian Perrin was not the fascinating anecdotes of talking to ex-murderers and rapists, nor the horror stories of crimes they committed, but my overwhelming sense of repulsion, and shame.
Shame that arose not out of some of the horrendous acts committed by some of these criminals, but my presumptuous assumption that these people were a black, unspeakable nuisance that infiltrated our society. No, as Christian had seen it first-hand, “these [people] were humans, just like us, many of them driven to crime simply because of the unforeseen circumstances they were in.” I had adopted such a prejudiced, one-sided perspective on this group of people, partly perpetrated by dramaticized media portrayals combined with my complicit acceptance of this “truth,”
Whether we like it or not, the media we are bombarded with everyday carries some form of bias. Well, otherwise, there will be no Dickens or Hemingway or Woolf, nor Picasso or Bach or Al Pacino. What is important is whether people can objectively digest, criticize, and probe the information they receive, but research shows otherwise. We live increasingly in a world where information plays an ever paramount role, but society as a whole continually fails to appreciate its ever subtle ramifications.
Studies in media bias suggest that people who already adopt a certain viewpoint on an issue, say Brexit or the Trump administration, will gravitate towards news outlets which reinforce their extreme viewpoints- not too surprising, right? However, when the same experiment was repeated with the names of the news organizations blanked out, participants consistently rated articles with opposing viewpoints as “significantly more impartial,” highlighting even how a single glance at a webpage may already instil misleading preconceptions in our mind.
This finding chillingly confirms the danger of the artificial “filter bubble” of online media, which, with the notable exception of Wikipedia, almost all major websites engage in. This spiralling positive feedback loop is already bad enough for ourselves we are insidiously nudged towards extremifying viewpoints, even before you consider the social implications.
The University of Michigan finding, college students today score 40% worse off on standardized empathy tests compared with the 1980’s, indicates something is deeply wrong with the way we relate to one another. In a world where issues as decisive as abortion to as undebatable as climate change are argued and haggled in this jumble of meaningless altercation, more show than substance, understanding has become ever more important yet rarer as ever.
It is this lack of understanding that Joy Haugen, a UWCSEA service officer who was a Sudanese refugee, cites as the primary problem faced by refugees when trying to integrate themselves within a new community. She recounted her high school experience in an all-white high school in the states where she was marginalized and dehumanized, known only as “the refugee girl.” It is this stereotype that existed in the minds of her fellow peers that prevented both parties from gain understanding into each other’s cultures. “Read more and find out the true story of less fortunate people,” she implored, “The media often instills fear in people’s hearts, instead of accurately portraying the reality.”
This misportrayal in media is far more subtle and pervasive than misrepresentation; it is also the lack of representation of certain issues and peoples. The very cause of this distortion stems from the competition that journalists face when engaging our attention. As cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker had put it, “News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen.”
Yet I argue that it is something more pernicious than that, as in addition, things that we “don’t see” will be lumped into our faulty conclusion of its non-existence.
A few months ago I felt mildly surprised upon coming across a video made by popular Youtube vlogger Hank Green documenting his journey after being diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic gastrointestinal condition. Realizing that Ella Joicey, a UWC student who is also afflicted with the same condition made me seriously rethink my preconceived notions I had about disabilities in general. She describes it as an invisible disability, explaining how because “… no one sees it [ulcerative colitis], there no awareness about it, so people do not understand.”
This lack of representation plays out ever so clearly in Chinese media and culture where it is seen as taboo. Offending someone by suggesting they have some form of disability is now perceived as one of the most extreme forms of insult. If, according to the World Health Organization, over 1 billion people, almost 15% of the population “live with some form of disability,” why is this fact not being recognized more honestly? Media wields the ultimate power of influence, yet is being used to echo superficiality.
The consequence of our warped perception of reality increasingly propels us to adopt incomplete or extremified views on other people, especially those who may have opposing viewpoints. A society, our society, built on a destructive us v.s. them dynamic instead of a healthy tolerance for differing perspectives, where divergence and individuality is seen as a threat, instead of valued as engines for innovation.
Yet, in spite of this toxic culture that modern media has cultivated, in spite of the “fake news” so rampant in the headlines as of late, our media has the power to do just the opposite, to illuminate instead of conceal, to connect instead of push apart.
As the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had said, “Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
By Anthony Shen, G9