{"id":9463,"date":"2026-06-24T08:32:36","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T12:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/?p=9463"},"modified":"2026-06-24T08:32:36","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T12:32:36","slug":"who-controls-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/?p=9463","title":{"rendered":"Who Controls the Story?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Audrey Wu ’28
\n<\/span>EE <\/span><\/i>Co-Editor<\/span><\/p>\n

Statistically, the average person\u2019s mathematical probability of being in an exact place at an exact time is incredibly small. Therefore, it\u2019s unsurprising that most people will never witness a major world event firsthand. Instead, they read about, scroll past, or hear it discussed in their everyday lives. By the time these stories reach them, that event has already been shaped by multiple forces-editors, governments, and culture. The version of events we receive is never the full picture; it\u2019s simply a frame. Whoever controls this frame has enormous power over how billions of people interpret reality daily.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This occurrence is especially apparent when looking at political events in China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, three places where the gap between lived experiences and manipulated public narratives has been volatile in the last few years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The 2019 Hong Kong protests<\/b> offer an example of how a single event can fuel incompatible narratives. Triggered by a proposed extradition bill that potentially could\u2019ve sent suspected fugitives to face trial in mainland China, the movement drew as many as two million protesters on a single day. Western media largely framed it as a pro-democracy uprising while the Chinese state media called it foreign-instigated rioting. Clearly, both were selective in reporting their respective angles. Western coverage argued that the bill compromised Hong Kong\u2019s judicial independence from China. Some reported the critical economic disputes caused by a housing market so unaffordable that many individuals could never realistically enter it with public housing access severely constrained. For many Hong Kong youth, the bill became an outlet for accumulated frustration over economic \u201chopelessness\u201d. Meanwhile, China\u2019s framing centered on stopping fugitives evading justice by seeking a safe haven in Hong Kong. Oftentimes, audiences exposed to either version of the news interpret the events in biased ways based on their pre-existing beliefs.<\/span><\/p>\n

China\u2019s handling of COVID-19<\/b> demonstrates what happens when narrative control operates at a national scale. In January 2020, citizen journalist Chen Quishi traveled to Wuhan and documented overcrowded hospitals and insufficient supplies, footage that contradicted official reassurances. Soon after, he disappeared on February 7, 2020. Fellow journalist, Li Zehua, livestreamed police hammering on his apartment door before going silent. Simultaneously, Chinese authorities deployed over 300 state journalists to Wuhan to publicize the government\u2019s response as effective and controlled. The narrative lens quickly moved from scenes of chaos and despair to one of state triumph and stability. Furthermore, state-affiliated outlets amplified this globally, creating a profound divide: domestic and international populations processed the same crisis through polarized systems. It wasn\u2019t simply propaganda; it was an information \u201cecosystem\u201d structured so that inconvenient evidence rarely survived long enough to spread.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Philippine drug war under Rodrigo Duterte <\/b>acts as the most morally urgent case. The United Nations estimated approximately 27,000 citizens were killed, though that figure was rarely widely reported. Philippine police maintained their lower tally and pressured news outlets to use it instead. This dominant domestic narrative framed bloodshed as necessary governance to control widespread drug use and related crimes. This was largely sustained through Facebook, which had launched a free mobile internet service in the Philippines in 2013, effectively making the platform synchronous with the internet for millions of Filipinos. Facebook\u2019s Global Politics Director later referred to the country as \u201cpatient zero\u201d in the fight against digital misinformation-a place where Duterte\u2019s campaign assembled fake accounts and paid influencers to convey support, then converted that operation into a state-sponsored weapon after winning. Maria Ressa and her outlet <\/span>Rappler<\/span><\/i> documented both the killings and this digital infrastructure in great detail, describing it as a \u201cbehavior modification system\u201d where lies spread faster than fact. The government responded by filing eleven cases and investigations against her within fourteen months. Whether people believed that the vigilante killings were justified or not, the case of this drug war remained unsolved.<\/span><\/p>\n

The common denominator across these three cases is <\/span>framing<\/b>, which is the idea that powerful editorial choices aren\u2019t about fabricating facts, but about selecting which facts matter, which \u201cevidence\u201d to highlight, which emotions to amplify, and which voices to interpret. Calling Hong Kong protestors \u201crioters\u201d versus \u201cdemonstrators\u201d isn\u2019t neutral. Emphasizing China\u2019s vaccine exports over its silencing of citizen journalists isn\u2019t neutral. A calculated algorithm feeding Filipino users pro-Duterte content with the sitting president weaponizing misinformation isn\u2019t neutral. Each of these choices quietly shapes what audiences consider as truth, threatening, or worth dying for.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Social media has considerably exacerbated this issue. Platforms built on engagement consistently reward outrage and fear over accuracy and truth. In all three nations, people were simultaneously overloaded with information and operated on distorted realities; not because they were undiscerning but because the systems delivering information to them were designed to prioritize attention over truth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Media algorithms and outlets are also key distortors through the purposeful omission of perspectives. In Hong Kong, the voices of the working-class residents were rarely featured. In China\u2019s pandemic coverage, the plight of the rural and migrant populations was invisible. In the Philippine drug war, victims from poor urban communities ended up as statistics rather than human lives with stories worth telling. These absences aren\u2019t coincidental; in fact, they reflect which perspective media institutions consider worth spreading. Who speaks and what the narrative gets amplified have become our modern-day form of power.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Real media literacy is vital, especially for the next generation. It means asking the real questions beyond <\/span>what happened<\/span><\/i>, but <\/span>who\u2019s telling me this, why, and what are they leaving out<\/span><\/i>. It means discerning where we get our information and how we process this information. For events in Hong Kong, China, and the Philippines, those questions determine what people believe, who they hold accountable, and whether violence gets named as such or quietly dissolves into noise that is meant to distract from the truth. The frame is never simply a frame. For most, it’s the only window they have of the world, and we hold the power to open that window for a wider perspective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Feature Photo Courtesy: Nieman Reports<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Audrey Wu ’28 EE Co-Editor Statistically, the average person\u2019s mathematical probability of being in an exact place at an exact time is incredibly small. Therefore, it\u2019s unsurprising that most people will never…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":9465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9464,"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9463\/revisions\/9464"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thseagleseye.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}