TAYAH LEE

Our Own Little Echo Chamber

On the night of Thursday January 12th, 2017, I lay in my bed reading the assigned articles for my Journalism 100 course. As the start of the course lined up conveniently with the inaugural season for the 45th American president, our first topic of study was the role the media played in the presidential campaigns. The article I was readying was by Masha Gessen—a Russian American reporter who had previously lived under an autocracy in Russia—giving advice to the American public. Her article, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” read, “[Trump] is … probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan.” Although all of these claims may in fact be objective truths, it was difficult to read this article without hearing the voice of one of my classmates who, when asked about his opinion of our class, responded with the statement, “It’s very left-winged.”  

While Journalism 100 informs its students of the dangers of biased media sources and partial intake of information, it doesn’t do much to prevent its classroom from becoming an echo chamber itself. The majority of articles that fuel classroom discussion is from sources such as Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Al Jazeera America, all of which have more consistently liberal audiences according to the Pew Research Center.

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This is an understandable trend, as the UBC campus tends to have a liberal atmosphere. In fact, in an interview published in UBC News by April van Ert, UBC Sociology Professor Neil Gross states, “Broadly speaking, professors in the US and in most other parts of the world do tend to be on the political left.” This tendency does not exclude the professor of our Journalism course, Emmy Award-winning journalist and filmmaker Peter W. Klein, whose works have been featured on CBS, PBS, ABC, and other news organizations with left-leaning audiences. While this general predisposition of a predominantly liberal atmosphere is not a problem in itself, it does create the need to combat what the 100-level course informs its students of: only seeing events from one point of view.

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The way that facts have been presented as well as the class discussions that have taken place have been, although not necessarily pro-Clinton, highly anti-Trump. And in a course that claims to merely shed light on how media bias and fake news has effected the election, I don’t see a reason for only one political party to be scrutinized and not the other. Granted, the election has already occurred, and Donald Trump has already been inaugurated as the president of the United States. It senses for the course to focus on the ways that the media has aided his campaign in particular, albeit in a negative light. However, I—and I’m sure many other people—would like to escape from the echo chamber that I have been in and view the political events from the perspective of those who are hopeful for the season to come.

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After receiving the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award at the International Press Freedom Awards ceremony, Christiane Amanpour said that she believes in being truthful, not neutral. “Truthful is bringing the truth. Neutral can be creating a false equivalence between this side and that,” Amanpour later clarified, Kristine Marsh reported in her Media Research Center’s NewsBusters article. The concept of being truthful over neutral is a difficult thing in the post-truth era that we are currently living in, but is definitely a stand that Journalism 100 has decided to make. But are we as students supposed to blindly accept that the information we are receiving as truth without asking to see counter-perspectives? Journalism 100 has taught us better than that.