Accurate and efficient journalism is crucial in the modern world. To remain educated on scandalous events and controversies, people depend on news to inform them — promoting worldwide safety through awareness.
However, when organizations fail at impartial representation, many are robbed of their advocacy.
Specific demographics are inclined to have more attention and sympathy than others, causing transparent biases among journalists.
For instance, on June 18, news sites were flooded with headlines after the OceanGate Titan submersible imploded, killing the five passengers onboard during their journey to see the wreckage of the 1912 RMS Titanic. Their names and careers became public knowledge, as well as their thoughts and feelings after buying their ticket and before closing the titanium door to their own demise.
Hourly reporting was provided internationally while social media was taken by storm for weeks, condolences especially given to the family of Suleman Dawood, the teenager who only went as a Father’s Day gift at the inclinations of his father, Shahzada Dawood. While the occurrence was surely a tragedy that deserved media coverage, few organizations took an interest in what other devastations circulated the world during this time.
For example, four days prior to the Titan sub disaster in June, the 400-person capacity fishing boat Adriana, carrying approximately 750 refugees from the Middle East, embarked from Libya to Italy on June 10, where the migrants hoped to find a better life for themselves and their children. Faced with a capsizing vessel, the Greek Coast Guard found 104 survivors and 82 bodies, according to Business Insider. Due to all of the Pakistanis, women, and children being crammed into the lower decks before the voyage, only men were left alive.
While both of these instances happened within days of each other, the Titan sub received signficiantly more news coverage than the sunken ship that was given little care or notice. In a Scientific American article detailing the media’s clear bias in regards to both circumstances, writer Katharina Menne questioned, “Why does the fate of a few people who volunteered for an intrepid adventure touch us so much more than that of thousands of desperate people who chose to escape war and poverty?”
A person’s qualifications to have adequate recognition by the news becomes a glaring question of possible prejudices, reflected throughout journalism’s history as well.
While the Titan sub incident has illustrated transparent bias, similar behavior was also shown for passengers of the 1912 Titanic itself, in an ironic yet timeless display of favoritism. Setting sail from England to New York, when the infamous collision with the iceberg occurred, most of the 713 survivors were members of the first and well-to-do second classes, while of the 706 third-class steerage passengers, only 178 survived, reported on by History on the Net, a research database for history’s most notable events. Although when the remaining passengers arrived in America, the media flocked to the stories and names of the wealthy—ignoring the lost among steerage. The Titanic Newspaper Archives holds numerous headlines of papers in the time after the sinking, all discussing what happened to the richest members on board. One edition only mentions those such as Mr. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor and Mr. and Mrs. Strauss, millionaires from first-class. This same paper only gives attention to third-class to claim, “MEN IN 1ST AND 2D CABINS CALM; ITALIANS SHOT TO KEEP ORDER.” Other papers follow this trend, only following the identities of the wealthy while entirely ignoring the fact that most of the third-class was decimated, their stories and names ignored until years later.
Although the Titanic and Titan sub were over a century apart, the theme continues in which the wealthy have the attention and sympathy of the news more than the impoverished ever will, highlighted by the five lost passengers of the sub receiving international sympathies while the migrants were left without a voice.
News biases, affected heavily by both demographics and political beliefs, are detrimental to the world, allowing people to read misinformed and prejudiced sources that they are encouraged to trust for their fairness.
It is a dangerous circumstance when journalism becomes plagued by inclinations, threatening to further divide the world over controversies and foster a society where there is no neutral reporting, no desire to only search for the facts; only a search for what will reap the greatest support for one side.
It is the civic duty of the news to provide viewers with correct data that properly represents both sides to the story, making it unacceptable to stray from this path of obligation that every journalist is expected to follow.
