Read News From Global Resources — In an address to Media Bias in the Current Society

In the epic of information communication, people’s view of the world is not only built by the education they receive and the leading of parents, but also be shaped by the information they receive from all around them. News is one of the basic sources of information that people use to know about what is happening in the current society, The way it is published, the events it describes, the social spirit it portrays, all have huge impacts on people’s view of the whole world. However, instead of being impartial, the news reported by major media today is creating bias on certain races or countries in the world. While reading news solely from local resources remains a prominent practice that is crucial for the maintenance of national dignity, reading news published by media from all over the globe should become the future trend because it will contribute to the relief of media bias and construction of a peaceful society by offering people a more comprehensive view of the world and developing their critical thinking.

Media bias refers to the bias of the selection of events by the journalist in the mass media and how the events are described. There are two major types of media bias, according to Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002), ideology and spin. Ideology is the kind of media bias that a news media want to shape the opinion of people to particular direction by keeping reporting certain phenomenon or commenting on events that follow certain spirits, while spin is the media bias that media simply try to create stories that are attractive and memorable by appealing to memorable events. Currently, the major source of news for people around the world is the news media of the country they belong to. It’s an undeniable fact that the news media will publish news in a way that follows the social spirit of the country they belong to, which creates media bias dispute among different countries due to the selection of different events to report and the reporting styles. Some news media will also try to report on the events that relate to current hotspots or emphasize certain sides of the events to attract more audience. As people are kept exposed to what the government wants them to see or only view the news they want to view, their daily considerations will be changed and follow the spirit delivered by the media, finally, people’s schema of perceiving the world will change as time pass(Entman, 1989). In this way, this practice creates an extremely unbalanced spread of news around the world and leads to biased views toward certain countries.

Here is a representative example. After the “911” tragedy, a great fear of terrorism and Muslims rose in the heart of the American people. The term Islamophobia is born at the moment. Even in nowadays society, 20 years after the “911”, the stereotype of being brutal and cruel is still put on Muslims. Obviously, not all Muslims are ruthless like terrorism, so what lead to this biased misperception? One big reason is the disparate publishing of news. In America, especially after the “911”, in order to appeal to people’s strong emotion and indignation relates to the event and the fear against terrorism, most news media keep reporting the terrorist activity in the Islam countries to cater to the strong emotion and attract the attention of people to the articles, which provoke hostility against the whole Muslim body in Americans’ hearts. In this scenario, in order to draw more attention, American media create a strong media bias that only describes the terror side of Islamic countries but not a comprehensive view, and thus arouse Americans’ biased view of the whole Muslim group. However, if Americans can learn about some good aspects of Muslim life, instead of solely about war and casualties, from the news media in Islamic countries, the prejudice against Muslims will be relieved.

From the born of Islamophobia, media bias is having real-world effects on developing people’s stereotypes against other races or counties. How can we solve the problems? Reading news from global resources rather than simply from local media provides a good solution to media bias. By reading news from global resources, people can not only know life in other countries in their own description style but learn culture in a more comprehensive view and thus proceed in the elimination of prejudice and stereotyping toward other countries and races.

Here some may object reading news from local resources will contribute to the formation and development of national dignity. But the truth is reading news solely from the nation’s own media and keep putting the same spirit on people, a phenomenon called polarization will happen. This is when a group of people hold the same opinion and keep communicating with each other, the group will get more and more polarized toward the idea. In this way, if people keep receiving information maintaining the same social value, they will gradually lose critical thinking and blindly follow the media or the government. Offering people a global source of news, in contrast, will help people have a broader view of events that happen in all societies in the world and learn the social value of different countries. People will think critically about the events happening in their own country and form their own opinions toward the world, which will be more objective than that is tried to be shaped by their own countries. On the other hand, reading news globally doesn’t mean there’s no chance for people to read the news from their own country. Every country still preserves their own uniqueness and propagate the spirit they hold, but people have wider options to view.

So how can the practice of reading news from global resources be promoted? The internet and social media in the current society provide a good environment for the spread of news from different countries, they bring up chances for all people to access the information came from all over the world. The reason why some people don’t read news from other countries is due to the lack of accessibility, if they have access to all the information, they will tend to read more variable news. Being an international student myself, my resource of news from my own country can also bring more accessibility for people around me to the global news resources, so does the whole international student community. International students can also help to translate the news from their own country into English which increases the readability of the news and posting the news on their own social media or website will enable more people to view the news. What is more, news published by other countries about their traditional culture can be put on the national broadcast or news report like Network New Broadcast in China to attract people to learn about different civilizations. However, for countries like America and Britain where major news media is owned privately, how to encourage and motivate media and the government to advocate news from other resources still remains a problem.

Admittedly, the environment of social media and the internet is free of supervision, and there will be fake or exaggerated information on them. And the news of countries themselves are being biased sometimes. However, with the national propagation of official media from other countries and the mark of the website of other media as official website, real news can be identified from the fake information. Reading news from global sources can also boost people’s critical thinking skills that will help people better recognize the logical flaws in fake news. In other words, by comparing and contrasting the news published by different countries, at least people can see the multiple sides of certain events or countries and build up their own interpretations of that country instead of solely following the lead of their own country and media.

In a society that calls for equality among all races and countries, the spread of information, and especially the seems to be the most objective one — news are still creating a biased view of the world to every individual. So let us make a move, advocate reading news from diverse resources, and promote a peaceful and respectful society.

Sources

Entman, Robert M. “How the Media Affect What People Think: An Information Processing Approach.” The Journal of Politics, vol. 51, no. 2, 1989, pp. 347–370., https://doi.org/10.2307/2131346.

Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Andrei Shleifer. “Media Bias.” 2002, https://doi.org/10.3386/w9295.