Does the name Hind Rajab mean anything to you? She was a six year old Palestinian girl fleeting her homeland in a car with her family when that car was shot 355 times. She was murdered by Israeli Defense Forces. Three hundred and fifty-five bullets. And the world didn’t even blink. A 31 year old white American male was shot and killed in Utah. One bullet. It is guaranteed that anyone you meet knows his name: Charlie Kirk.
The amount of reporting that these two individuals received varied drastically. Rajab lived and died amidst a war in the Middle East, and her story wasn’t told. If the two murders received the same amount of attention from the media, maybe the war that claimed Rajab’s life wouldn’t still be happening. The problem within journalism today is a substantial loss of humanity, especially when it comes to those outside of Western nations, ignorance is being cultivated by unreliable journalism in Western society.
In Western society it seems that reporting dies down when it comes to coverage on the Middle East, Africa, South America, and Asia. The top headline in any news source always seems to be about regions like America, Europe, Canada. This isn’t a coincidence. Selective reporting is the practice of omitting facts from the public that the reporter doesn’t deem necessary. This is shown when news stations like FOX and CNN consistently center their content around western culture and politics rather than economic crisis and bloodshed throughout the rest of the world. This leads to Eurocentrism, which is the idea that European culture, politics, and values have the most global significance.
Europe and America’s relationship is often described as the most integrated economic partnership in the world. America is linked to Europe through trade, pharmaceuticals, and economics. This relationship appears in the media through the obvious bias America has for Europe, which leads mainstream media to center around America and Europe leaving other countries to suffer. Thinking that other countries’ crises don’t affect America is an ignorant idea spreading like a virus across the nation. Realizing that an entire country is suffering and America has the resources to help, but doesn’t, isn’t okay. Western journalism as a whole needs to improve on telling everyone’s story, not just the ones that reporters find important. Bias has no place in journalism and news stations and journalists need to work harder to present facts to the public.
It’s likely that someone looking at the news would think that Western society has isolated itself. American media has allowed for their citizens to seek confirmation in their biases and prejudices, even though real facts present the opposite of their beliefs. This again, circles back to the relationship between Europe and America. Just because suffering isn’t taking place here, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. More than 18 million people currently starve in Yemen, and 7.3 million citizens of the DRC face displacement. More than 80,000 cases of rape were reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from January to September of 2025. Approximately 16.5 million Syrians are in need of Humanitarian aid as of June 2025. And 70,117 people have been murdered in Palestine by Israeli Defense Forces since 2023. None of these issues have an end in sight.
Education is power, news shouldn’t be a nuisance—it is a right. It is a right to be informed, and rights are being stolen all over the world. Journalism is giving a voice to those who don’t have one, and western journalism must get better at that.
