"American Misconceptions of Syria"
Download PDF About the AuthorFeras Aboukhater is a third-year undergraduate student with a Biology major and a minor in Medicine, Health, and Society at SUNY Stony Brook University. He wrote this research paper for his WRT 102 class in his freshman year. Feras plans to go into medical school when he is done with his undergraduate degree and he aspires to become a Cardiologist. ContentsHow Fox News Frames the War in Syria What Living in Safe Parts of Syria Looks Like Balancing Between Conflict and Peace |
TV’s Effect on PeopleWatching cable television has an undeniably strong effect on the framing of the American people’s views and can sometimes affect their actions too. “I tell you that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me—big impact” (qtd. in Doucet 143). That was President Trump’s reaction to what he saw about Syria two years ago most probably on Fox News because it’s the channel that supports his political views, and it is well known that he regularly watches it. Sixty-three hours after this reaction, the President decided to make an airstrike on Syria (Doucet 143). We can link this again to what was happening a year ago and how President Trump was threatening an airstrike on Syria because of the images and news he was seeing on TV. No matter how much support you have towards President Trump, this shocking fact must prove to you how dangerously effective is the one-sided portrayal of Syria on American TV. Media is now capable of affecting the world’s decision-makers, so what about the views of normal people? Contemporary Americans’ views on Syria and Syrians do not seem to have been systematically studied before; however, here is a very similar example that applies to the Syrian case and proves the effect TV has on Americans. Mexican immigration is a controversial topic that has been standing out for years and that can be related to the Syrian case because of serious misunderstandings caused by or correlated with mainstream TV broadcasts. Gil de Zúñiga et al. concluded that the more individuals watch Fox News, the less likely they will be to support Mexican immigration or to hold positive views about Mexicans because they are convinced by the negative images portrayed about Mexicans in Fox News. 1,159 Americans who had different socio-political ideologies and who were exposed to different news outlets participated in this study. Comparing to the Syrian case, the same thing can be seen; showing nothing but war and destruction on TV channels like Fox News would frame a wrong view about Syria and Syrians in the minds of Americans, causing them to be against Syrian immigration and putting Syrians living in the US in an uncomfortable position of trying to show the other side of Syria that no one talks about. What makes TV news more influential on the views of Americans towards Syria is that Americans don’t tend to have any prior opinion on the conflict there and that every TV channel or media source available for them presents the same perspective, which is the war perspective. This fact makes the framing of Syria presented by Fox News and other American TV channels unchallenged because how would someone even guess that there is normal life other than war if all they can see is war? A noteworthy quotation by Winston Churchill that illustrates this point is: “There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.” Feldman showed that people perceive more story bias in opinionated news than in non-opinionated news, but these perceptions vary as a function of the audience’s agreement with the news content. In our case the audience does not have any agreement or disagreement with the news content, implying that they would never be able to perceive bias in news about Syria and that’s what results in framing the wrong views about this country in their minds.
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