Media being used to mislead the public in the interest of policy makers and government is nothing new. The explosion of the U.S. battleship Maine on Feb. 15, 1898 — and its subsequent misattribution of fault as a deliberate Spanish attack on the United States — provided the justification for the Spanish-American War. Newspaper publisher and politician William Randolph Hearst spun the narrative with his empire of publishing to manufacture consent among the American people for an invasion of Cuba, thereby furthering the interests of U.S. foreign policy.
Journalism lives in perpetual risk because financial and ideological incentives can overshadow a commitment to the truth, leading to an inherent conflict of interest. To do good journalism, your chief interest needs to be in the journalism itself, and not in what it can do for you. Financial pressures can shut down newspapers, but losing credibility is what kills the craft. When the public loses trust in the press, it isn’t just an institution that suffers — it’s our shared understanding of reality. Without agreed-upon facts, substantive debate and meaningful accountability become impossible. And without a foundation of trust, journalism loses the very authority that makes it valuable, allowing misinformation and partisan narratives to flourish.
The greatest limiting factor to any journalistic operation is financial. Operating costs are high, and ethical practices generally prefer the news to be accessible at little to no cost. But the financial imperative to stay afloat can lead to ethical compromises and the increased comingling of journalism and business interests.
We’ve all encountered paywalls while trying to read an article. It’s not just bothersome, but for the grand majority unwilling or unable to add another subscription to their monthly wallet drain, paywalls effectively hide away vital information and can act as a putoff for the entire publication. Best case scenario, readers will pivot to another similarly reliable news source and glean the information there. Worst case, that crucial knowledge remains inaccessible to the reader.
CNN has recently announced its plans to impose paywalls on its website in an attempt to increase revenue, marking a significant shift for the network. While other print outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and many other mainstream media actors have long maintained paywalls to compensate for the gradually diminished returns on their print issues, this is a relatively new idea for CNN. This commodification of journalism has eroded the availability of accessible, public and reliable news.
This poses a significant misinformation threat, as it only takes one free alternative with a convincing narrative to sway audiences away from verified news sources. The more credible sources that erect financial barriers to their work, the easier it is for somebody who is more concerned with spreading a narrative than making an immediate profit to fill the void.
Political agendas cannot only drive a newspaper’s publishing, but it can shape broader narratives to justify the actions of those who the publisher supports. This is called “the manufacture of consent” as coined by American journalist Walter Lippmann, and there are two primary ways by which this occurs: purposeful misattribution and embellishment. In an era defined by distrust and division, journalism that fails to uphold its own standards of non-bias and a misguided sense of objectivity only deepens the cracks in our collective understanding of reality.
Last December, The New York Times published “‘Screams Without Words,’” which was meant to be a comprehensive account of the purportedly deliberate weaponization of sexual violence on the Palestinian militant group Hamas’ attacks on nearby Israeli towns on Oct. 7. Hamas was accused of executing a systematized and premeditated wave of sexual assaults to specifically demoralize the Israeli people. But after closer scrutiny by the public and other journalists, the veracity of the reporting was challenged.
Upon closer inspection, the details of the story completely fell apart. The article, co-written by Anat Schwartz, Jeffrey Gettleman and Adam Sella made claims with no conclusive evidentiary support. According to Schwartz, the story was dictated top to bottom by the newspaper’s leadership who approached Schwartz herself to write the article. Aside from Schwartz being a former Israeli air force intelligence official whose X account liked a tweet calling for “turn(ing) the (Gaza) strip into a slaughterhouse,” it turned out that not a single substantiated report of sexual assault could be provided. No hospital, no medical center, no rape clinic nor any other institution could point to a name and provide evidence of any specific attack occuring.
There isn’t a doubt that sexual assault occurred on Oct. 7. The nature of the attack was brutal, and in theaters of war there is always the ugly reality of gender-based violence. However, there is a great deal of difference between that claim, and what The New York Times published and failed to substantiate in their article. The piece was dictated and creatively steered by the newspaper’s editorial staff, written by a staunchly pro-Israeli advocate with no journalistic experience and an ideological agenda to prove, propagated to a public that was gradually turning against the conduct with which Israel was fighting the war. To this day, the only proof that has been provided for a mass coordinated sexual assault dictated by Hamas has come from Israeli officials claiming there have been eyewitness reports of assault happening — the exact people who would benefit from the manufacturing of consent for the war that publishing this article achieved.
To be concerned for the future of journalism is to understand the dire state the field is in now. As readers, we cannot afford to be passive consumers of news sources — it’s on us to be vigilant and discerning. Check sources, question motives and scrutinize what you read. This is crucial to staying an informed citizen in a society that shamelessly perpetuates misinformation for profit.
The goal of journalism is not profit or prestige, it is the pursuit and dissemination of the truth. When that mission is compromised, the foundations of an informed society begins to crumble. This isn’t a question of whether journalism will survive, but rather if it will maintain its core purpose of informing the public for the greater good.
WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.
Contact Noah Zaldivar at [email protected].
