News media in the Western world are the freest, while media is systematically clamped by rulers in non-Western countries.
This is an accepted “fact”, justified by criteria such as Freedom of speech, Press Freedom and Independent Journalism etc.
Different Kinds of Media Biases
There are four kinds of biases in news media:
- Parochial disinterest – we are not interested in anything beyond our own affairs
- Civilizational bias – we will use our “freedom” to show whom we choose to in bad light, but they can never do the same to us. If they try, we will attack them relentlessly
1. Censorship by the ruling elite of a country
Visit the North Korean official news outlet and you’ll see instantly how the universe revolves around the Supreme Leader.
Iran’s official news agency gives almost the same impression.
We have to be careful to not assume that a “supreme” leader’s photo with the text “total power” on the first page makes that media censored.
This is the easiest to detect bias that non-profit organisations like Reporters without Borders have done immense amount of work to fight against.
2. Parochial disinterest – we really don’t care about anything outside our own narrow sphere
This bias is very understandable as limiting focus due to choice of readers/watchers, sometimes due to a lack of resources. Take for example, one of the official news agencies from Somalia, Puntland Post Somaliland and Puntland are self-declared states of Somalia.
USA Today will give you the same feeling as you leaf through it. But they do have a disclaimer, which says “National newspaper”.
3. Civilizational bias – we will use our “freedom” to show whom we choose in bad light, but they cannot do the same for us.
This is the most difficult bias to detect, but yet it is the most pernicious and persistent. If you talk about this, you will instantly get most of your liberal friends turn against you by calling you a delusional conspiracy-theorist.
Knowing so much from movies and serials about the Third Reich’s, Soviet Union’s, President Putin’s or China’s propaganda machines you instantly have cognitive dissonance when thinking about the contemporary “free” Western Media with such a discriminative lens.
During the last few weeks, when the Covid-19 pandemic has been wreaking absolute carnage in the UK, the statistics show this picture.
But if you look at the BBC, official news page, (most people get their news from the front page and never go beyond into individual sections), there is no mention of how UK is suffering, yet there is constant attack on how some other countries are not doing things “right”.
On any day, the only news from India, a country that has managed, through the largest lockdown in human history, to contain the pandemic far better than the Western countries, contains the implicit message “Look how badly poor developing-country India is doing. What else can you expect from them!” Yet, surprisingly, the “less-free” Indian media doesn’t retaliate.
BBC attacks Singapore for its Covid-19 handling.
Yet Singapore’s “less-free” media doesn’t retaliate by pointing out the situation in UK.
Generally, in the West, bring up any topic to do with Islam or Muslim and you notice a very interesting policy.
On one hand, you will see some totally deluded people blaming Islam or Muslims for everything that, according to them, should have been done differently, e.g., immigration, education and even their coffee.
On the other hand, most of the Western media, especially the North European ones, will carefully avoid mentioning Muslim or Islam in any way because they are afraid of conflicts and claim they are protecting “human rights”. The media will publish stories of atrocities on Muslims, e.g., the Rohingya atrocities in Myanmar:
or Indian Police Accused of Brutality in Kashmir, without fact-checking and contextualising issues.
And give even the Nobel Prize to a young girl paraded as a sacrificial lamb of peace to show that “We love Muslims and Islam, look we are defending you!”
But, at the same time, most of the people implicitly support their chosen Western governments selling weapons of mass destruction and waging one-sided wars that have killed more than 20 million people (mostly Muslims) in unnecessary Western wars, according to Global Research, based in Montreal, Canada.
With the current Covid-19 pandemic, things are getting rather deadly. The Global Network Against Food Crises, an official body jointly functioning under EU and the UN, warns recently that Covid-19 pandemic would soon unleash a famine of biblical proportions if the Western powers continue to wage wars there.
Another interesting bias of the non-US Western media, is showing president Trump, who constantly gives them ammo every time he open his mouth, as the mouthpiece of US’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis.
In fact, the information given out by the US authorities and some media outlets about the Covid-19 pandemic has been the best and the most detailed among all the countries of the world. Infinitely more detailed and useful for understanding the wider social and demographic implications of the crisis. This categorical information presenting has been remarkably shoddily done by the Nordic welfare states that pride themselves as being the most advanced in the world.
Test for yourself these biases, and you will be surprised.
Professor Noam Chomsky, in his 2002 book, Media Control, The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, gives two definitions of democracy.
Definition 1- “the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free.”
Definition 2 – ”the public must be barred from managing of their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled.”
The difference among “Supreme Leader” societies and the “Free” societies then becomes such that “Supreme Leader” societies keep the people in the second definition by crude force.
In the “Free” countries, people are led to believe that definition 1 works for them, but in reality the effects of the people’s decision making interventions (e.g., through open elections) are contained and leveraged to keep crucial business such as staging wars going on as usual.
