Editor’s Voice

Noisy News Cancelling the Search for Truth

A lot has happened in the past two years. The Middle East has always been full of controversy, conflict, and challenges. However, in the past two years, the entire media, if not the world, SEEMS to be interested in the region. Some use the events to increase their clicks. Some claim to have genuine interest in the region and the suffering its people are enduring. And some are creating platforms solely to cover the situation in the Middle East. Yet, despite the volume of coverage, meaningful efforts to address root causes remain scarce. 

If nothing else, there is a Persian poem that roughly translates into “an iron smith made a mistake in this Balkh [an ancient Iranian city] and they executed a copper smith in Shoushtar [another ancient Iranian city]”. One state commits atrocities, another state becomes the judge, and a third state pays the price. The citizens of the Middle East are facing dire, and in many cases deadly, challenges. And a small cluster of powerful media institutions, largely based in the West, continue to dominate how the region’s realities are framed, interpreted, and morally evaluated. Not only that, we keep seeing reality TV shows and their hosts riding the events in the region as their evidence and mixing fact with fiction just to have more viewers. 

Beginning from September 11th, 2001, if not sooner, we are witnessing frivolous application of technical terms hijacked from social sciences as justification for what is happening -words like terrorism, human rights and national security have become punchlines and clickbaits. Ironically, those who study history can easily see how we have been pushed to a vicious cycle of misinformation and disinformation to direct the narrative and public opinion towards certain groups’ goals and objectives.

Journalism’s public-service function is increasingly overshadowed by attention economics. It keeps getting further and further from its initial objective; its calling, its purpose. Since 2008 and the introduction of smartphones as an inseparable part of everyday life, standards for media have kept depleting at alarming rates. Anyone with an Instagram account or a YouTube channel is now a journalist, claiming to be telling the truth. The speed-driven news cycle increasingly sidelines rigorous fact-checking in favor of immediacy. 

What is worse is that this has become mankind’s excuse for indifference and passivity. Instead of taking the victim to the hospital, simply posting a picture of the accident on Instagram seems to satisfy our sense of public responsibility. The news is not telling us everything anymore. And we are not asking it to do so either. A mutually destructive assurance for human decency at a global scale.

Here at Middle East Unveiled we are fed up with this ineffective, if not destructive, status quo. In the following weeks we are going to publish a series of articles focused on lifting the veil of ignorance off certain concepts about the Middle East that have been misrepresented by the western media for at least two decades, if not longer. Kindly and bravely join us on this journey of rediscovering the meaning of globalized humanity.