RAGS TO RICHES ON DEMAND: THE BLIND SPOT OF CHANGING NARRATIVES IN WESTERN MEDIA 

PHOTO: The New York Public Library on Unsplash

A young boy in the US and a young boy in China grow up under similar surveillance systems, hear similar promises of prosperity and absorb similar judgements about nations on the other side of the world. The former grows up in a system socially accepted as patriotic, while treating its mirror image suspiciously. These contrary depictions of the East and the West largely stem from the prevalence of Western-based news sources that often fail to prove their neutrality or objectivity. Such structural dominance is harmful because it creates street-level stigma against other nations that leaves people unable to accept new beliefs or critically think about their own opinions.

Today’s media landscape

A majority of the mass communication outlets most frequented by global audiences are found in Western capitals. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s proposed Propaganda Model from the work Manufacturing Consent links how and why this geographic concentration of media is systematic ideological bias, rather than just circumstantial. Major international wire services and legacy networks are predominantly headquartered in Western capitals, such as the BBC, CNN and Daily Mail. The United Nations is also headquartered in New York City, USA. 

Research indicates a substantial reliance by global news ecosystems on these primarily Western institutions, often at the cost of local and opposing points of view. As a result, Western corporate and geopolitical interests structurally dictate what constitutes objective norms, taking priority over depiction of the local priorities in Asian regions. Even the local news in Asian countries reflects what the Western country-focused analysis of an issue is. Global audiences internalise outcomes favourable to Western interests as overall better due to the lack of discussion around local impacts. 

This practise is known as agenda-setting, and is put to action in two main ways. Firstly, Asian countries are depicted either as “reliable and predictable” or as “too poor” and “backwards”. One contradiction is how Asian countries, for instance China, can be portrayed as achieving excellence in economics, medicine and other fields, then conversely be portrayed as economically struggling. Secondly, there is a contrary approach to similar autocratic actions by leadership in the West and Asia. In the West, surveilling or conservative rules are justified as preserving freedom and protection of the state. However, Asian countries are shown to be involved in humanitarian neglect or transnational acts of terrorism that impose on the freedom and privacy of citizens. 

PHOTO: 13th ASEAN-United States Summit in 2025, The White House on Wikimedia Commons

Contrasting depictions of Asia in Western affairs

The Propaganda Model argues that corporate mass media functions as systemic institutions that “manufacture consent” for elite political and economic agendas through structural biases, rather than acting as neutral reporters. 

A major consequence of such agenda setting is that media influence does not necessarily operate by telling people what to think, but what issues to think about and which ones they consider important. The amount of attention given to an issue can influence how important the public perceives that issue to be. Western suffering may be presented through individual stories, named victims, political debates, historical context and continuous updates, while suffering elsewhere in non-Western countries may be reduced to statistics, instability or brief descriptions of “conflict” — a clear ‘framing bias’ in headlines and how the audience will first perceive the issue. The difference is not just the amount of column inches or information available; it is the perceived humanity and significance of the people involved.

These systematic differences in visibility and framing can shape people’s understanding of who matters, whose suffering matters and which countries are perceived as powerful or legitimate.

Western political events like changes in government, conflicts, attacks like 9/11 and scientific achievements or breakthroughs, even historically, often receive greater visibility in Western media than developments elsewhere with no Western connection. The recent Israel-American-Iranian conflict gathered substantial attention and coverage, however this failed to properly extend to the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), especially with a lack of historical contextualisation and unbiased coverage. 

Evidence of this selective framing can be seen in the way India is a subject of discourse and the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi is discussed by US President Donald Trump. Trump has repeatedly shifted between portraying India negatively and presenting Modi as a valuable strategic partner depending on the political context. In February 2025, Trump welcomed Modi to the White House as “a great friend of mine” while warning that India would not be spared the higher reciprocal tariffs he was imposing worldwide. By April 2026, he was resharing a radio transcript on Truth Social that described India as a “hellhole,” a post India’s foreign ministry called “uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste”. Here it can be seen that Trump’s respect fluctuates when support and allyship is beneficial, in regards to consumer markets or development deals for defence or minerals, but the respect drops when it does not reflect the self-interest of the US. 

Such conduct by the US creates a contradictory image of India in which it can be portrayed as dirty, economically problematic or underdeveloped when such criticism is politically useful for gaining a dominant say in international affairs; however, for the US, India is deemed to be an important strategic partner in defence, resources and democratic allyship, inviting reciprocal cooperation. Therefore, China and India are not necessarily represented consistently, but according to Western interests and how a narrative can be made to give the upper hand to Western priorities. 

That same imbalance is also visible with the DRC. The International Crisis Group previously noted that even relatively minor incidents in Iraq or Afghanistan receive more Western coverage than the DRC. Even when the DRC receives major coverage today, it is named a regional conflict despite the 6 million reported deaths since 1996. More than 7 million people have been internally displaced due to the M23 rebellion backed by Rwanda. Despite the lack of usual media attention on the DRC, it frequently increases when the conflict concerns American diplomacy’s involvement in a brokered peace deal. The terms of the peace deal and its consequences directly support Western mineral interests in the DRC, rather than humanitarian aid provided to Congolese people in its own right. 

A similar pattern appears in science, where breakthroughs associated prominently with Western researchers and institutions are widely presented, whereas discoveries originating in Asian regions are more understated. For example, Chinese researchers have produced significant cancer-related breakthroughs, yet the individual researchers, like the late Sun Fanglin who worked in the development of new cancer treatments, have received less international recognition. Not much has crossed Western media coverage regarding the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology’s high energy physics breakthroughs that took place in Japan, led by Dr Nguyen Anh Ky.

There is a ‘Eurocentric bias’ in naming mathematical and academic principles or highlighting studies and articles by Western-based researchers. This raises questions of how scientific history is framed. Pythagoras’s name remains attached to his theorem and Bernoulli’s principle retains the name of its discoverer — the Swiss-born Daniel Bernoulli. However, the Taylor series, similar to what was originally founded by Madhava in ancient India circa 1400s, or Al Karaji’s first description of what became Pascal’s Triangle, are not named after these Asian academics. This is especially relevant today as the lack of research attributed to Asian researchers is weighed against the rapid developments in the West, suggesting to audiences a disparity in intelligence and credibility. 

More often than not, Asian countries are deemed to be doing exceptionally well in technological and medical advancements — such as China’s power moves toward infrastructural excellence or Japan’s digital technology. An extension of this is Indian MP Shashi Tharoor’s statement that Britain does owe reparations against opponents arguing that colonialism left India benefitting overall. The depiction of India as a growing economic and global power is used as an argument against the actionable accountability of compensating India for the damage done under British colonialism, including financial damage. 

PHOTO: Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Smoke and mirrors: Comparative bias between the West and Asia

Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said’s foundational framework in his work Orientalism demonstrates how Western discourse constructs a binary opposition between the “civilized” West and the “mysterious or pathological” East. Scholarly analyses of news framing, similar to political analysis of war models, show that when Western nations engage in actions like surveillance, geopolitical manoeuvring or economic intervention, it is often framed as pragmatic security or statecraft. When Asian nations execute identical measures, Western reporting deploys cultural tropes that trace the action back to an inherent authoritarian or “alien” nature. 

A significant bias in global media is the different standards applied to Western and Asian countries when similar actions occur. Behaviours that are widely condemned when associated with Asian countries can be softened or justified when carried out by Western governments. Because many Asian countries, like Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam are explicitly one-party authoritarian states, restrictions on opposition, speech and information are readily identified as authoritarian practices. Western states, however, retain constitutional protections, competitive elections and independent courts, so similar restrictions are more often framed as exceptional measures for security, safety or public order. This can create a media double standard when comparing authoritarian features like surveillance, presidential term limits, private citizens’s rights, equality and censorship. 

China’s use of facial recognition and extensive data collection is often portrayed as uniquely dystopian, yet Western governments increasingly use comparable technologies for policing, border control and public security. Flock Safety operates extensive automated licence-plate and neighbourhood surveillance networks across the United States, with more than 5,000 US law enforcement agencies and 120,000 cameras across 49 states. When China monitors citizens, it can be framed as authoritarian control; when Western states deploy similar systems, it is presented as necessary for safety and efficiency. This double standard framing ultimately benefits Western governments by promoting a “free West versus dangerous China” narrative, making audiences less likely to question their own government’s foreign policy or expansion of surveillance . The technology has nevertheless increasingly been criticised within the US itself as a form of mass surveillance, demonstrating that the dichotomy of the West’s actions being embraced while Asia is criticised is not absolute.

Cambodia and China demonstrate how removing political constraints can concentrate power. Hun Sen ruled Cambodia for more than three decades; his government arrested opposition leader Kem Sokha and the courts dissolved the main opposition party before the 2018 election. China similarly removed presidential term limits in 2018, enabling Xi Jinping to remain in power indefinitely. The US is fundamentally different, with an enforceable constitution, independent judiciary and competitive opposition. Nevertheless, Trump said in 2025 that he was “not joking” about seeking a third term, despite the Twenty-Second Amendment of the US Constitution limiting presidents to two elected terms. 

Both the United Kingdom and the US have established legal protections for speech and political expression. The UK protects freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, while the US First Amendment protects freedom of speech, religion, press and peaceful assembly. However, the Public Order Act in the UK created new protest offences, including obstructing key infrastructure and interfering with major works, with imprisonment available for some offences. Human Rights Watch argues that these expanded powers have interfered with peaceful protest. The US has increasingly attempted to crack down on anti-government protests through 41 anti-protest bills introduced in the last year. 

Selective media framing can narrow public perspectives by encouraging global audiences to view international issues through a largely nationalistic or Western-centred lens. Most people naturally rely on familiar, local and trusted news sources, meaning that deliberately seeking alternative perspectives already requires effort. When audiences do encounter reporting from outlets such as Al Jazeera, The Hindu or NHK Newspaper, these sources can be dismissed as “biased” or propaganda when they challenge narratives familiar to Western audiences, or due to criticism for being a state-funded organisation. Regardless of if those claims hold, it shows how Western media is not displayed as “propaganda” to the mainstream public. This creates a cycle in which mainstream Western sources are more readily accepted by local audiences while alternative perspectives are harder to embrace.

Were the curtains ever just blue? Media literacy in navigating agenda-set media

Ultimately, the issue is not simply that Western media is biased, nor that Asian countries are consistently portrayed negatively. The deeper problem is that the power to define what is normal, credible and important remains unevenly distributed.

Through the mechanisms described by the Propaganda Model and Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, the repeated contrast between a free, rational West and an authoritarian, unstable East demonstrates how the same behaviour can acquire completely different meanings depending on which country performs it.

This power differential benefits Western governments by exporting favourable narratives, reducing scrutiny and making criticism easier to dismiss as foreign propaganda. It can therefore create an agenda-set environment where audiences believe they are receiving an objective picture of the world while actually encountering a heavily framed version shaped by national interests. 

This matters because these representations do not remain inside screens. They shape public assumptions about entire nations, influence which humanitarian crises receive attention, determine whose scientific achievements are recognised and affect which governments are trusted or feared. 

The solution is therefore to question the structure through which truth becomes visible in the first place. Genuine media literacy requires comparing competing sources, examining who benefits from a particular narrative, questioning inconsistent standards and recognising what is absent as well as what is reported. A more balanced global understanding cannot emerge from choosing one side of the East–West divide; it requires recognising that no nation should possess a monopoly over the definition of objectivity.