When nuance is lost

Culture wars and the sensationalized news coverage of campus protests in mainstream media.

May 08, 2024

Early last week, I had intended on writing a piece on how I’ve had to confront my own ingrained biases around prestige during the college admissions process. As a young immigrant raised by parents who came to the U.S. with nothing in their pockets except a vision of the American dream, an education, and preferably one at a prestigious U.S. institution, was fervently believed to be the key to upward social mobility.

It’s been, at times, difficult to personally disentangle my changing views from this common immigrant ideology while going through application seasons with my two children. The debate on whether prestige from an “elite” college matters and if it’s worth the exorbitant price tag over a state school education rages on as it always has in certain circles.

But then, campus protests began to escalate with arrests and chaos. It started dominating the news. My intended newsletter suddenly fell flat and I scrapped it altogether. I struggled to pivot to another topic. My focus on anything other than what was unfolding around college campuses disappeared entirely. I became consumed by the news. Last Wednesday came and went and I did not send out a newsletter. I just couldn’t find any words.

There are moments when I become intensely self conscious that I’m putting out a jumble of words that will land in thousands of inboxes every week. Even now, I sit writing and erasing entire paragraphs over and over because I remain unconfident in how anything I write on the issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will land. Who am I and what right do I have in saying anything on this issue? I am not Jewish. I am not Palestinian. I don’t have “a side.” I am just a middle-aged mom living in a New York City bubble who happens to write a weekly newsletter about…well, life.

And, yet.

I am a human, just like many of you, who was horrified by the brutal attacks on Oct 7 and devastated by the relentless destruction and slaughter in Gaza. I am a person who can acknowledge and understand how some Jewish students are feeling threatened and unsafe in this protest environment while also believing that the situation on campuses have escalated into violence because of the disproportionate presence of riot police that, in my opinion, was not always warranted. A person who can sympathize with the anger and disappointment in graduations being canceled while also supporting students’ right to protest.

I am a person who believes that more than one thing can be true in a time when culture wars divide us into extremes. A person who is searching for nuance that has been lost. Even writing these words makes me nervous because of how polarizing and divisive this conflict is.

While I may not have any authority in treading into the waters of political and social commentary of this war, what I am is a parent of young adults who are witnessing the largest wave of college protests since the 1960s. And what I’ve increasingly observed over the past week is how the U.S. mainstream media has distorted the news for views and co-opted the coverage of campus protests to further political agendas.

The explosion in news coverage has been largely one-sided and has focused on the spectacle of chaos and not on the substance of the protest themselves.1 Even if you think that the actions of these students are misguided or lacking in comprehension of the complexity of the conflict or the demands of divestment, it’s hard to deny that we’ve been mostly fed sensationalized images of clashes and disruption. In the end, the media obsession with American students that bordered on hysteria for a few weeks has only distracted this country away from the actual events still occurring in Gaza.

It hasn’t been easy to follow what’s been happening as these protests unfold in real time on college campuses. Depending on where you get your news, the narrative can be contradictory. Are the encampments battle grounds of open hostility, hateful speech, and harassment as some media outlets would have you believe?

Or are they largely peaceful gatherings of what is essentially nerds camping out on school lawns, setting up libraries and organizing teach-ins as some students and journalists on the ground have reported? There are more than 100 encampments that have cropped up on campuses around the country and these student advocacy groups have been active for much of the academic year, but most never make it on national news, particularly schools that don’t have shiny names like the “elite” universities. Organized sit-ins and rallies have been conducted without incident, but they aren’t considered worthy of coverage unless violence erupts.

I admit, with some shame, that I had blinders on from the heaviness, the pain, and the atrocities of what is going on in the Gaza-Israel conflict; the news is just too sad to face. But the protests here on U.S. campuses have not allowed me to compartmentalize it out of sight any longer.

And isn’t that part of the point of protests? To force us to come face-to-face with uncomfortable issues that we may not want to see? I have since tried to educate myself on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and am reading and watching current events unfold. The blinders are now off.

College is a time for protesting. We encourage our youth to be civically engaged, to be passionate, to scrutinize and to ask the hard questions. Students are taught to interrogate with a critical lens, the moral issues of our world. They’ve always protested wars. I protested heavily when I was that age. I faced down cops in riot gear and yes, have been hauled away and detained. I also remember the resolute stance in my beliefs that sometimes has me shaking my head 30 years later.

These protests may be loud and imperfect, naive and idealistic, and unwavering in their convictions (nuance is lost on all sides), but this is how students have always tried to make sense of a world that often defies comprehension. This is especially true of this generation who have lost years of their youth to COVID, who are pissed (rightly so) at economic and climate uncertainty, and who are navigating a world full of policies that have failed to protect them.

Like many of you, I watched videos circulate on social media. Yes, I have also cringed at some of these clips, some taken out of context, that have done nothing to help with the optics of this student movement. But I have also seen grown adults gleefully mock and drag these “dumb,” “spoiled,” and “unattractive” college students on social media and the news, call them terrorists, liken the situation to January 6th and 1930s Europe,2 and cry for a call to the National Guard to intervene.

Let’s breathe and take a step back.

Students are often the ones who have the moral courage to speak out on issues that many of us are afraid to voice out loud—or worse, just shrug with apathy. It remains to be seen whether these students will land on the right side of history and you most likely have your own personal opinions on whether you agree with them or not. But if school administrations are this quick to intervene with militarized force against their students and faculty without attempts at engagement and dialogue—some preemptively within hours of erected encampments, they are drawing a line that divides an institution into a “us vs. them” situation. As a parent of college students, this is concerning. And I don’t see it ending just because the semester will soon be over.

Everything about the protests has been complicated, just like the war itself. Being human is complicated. I, myself, have been conflicted on how to feel and what to believe; my thoughts change sometimes by the hour. I’ve found myself questioning my sympathetic stance towards the protestors—bad actors and outside agitators aside—when I see occupied buildings, vandalism, break-ins, and graffiti. Vitriolic words have been shouted from both sides.

But in the end, I feel I owe the students a listen, to read their written words, to hear their reporting—some of which became the only journalistic coverage standing when press was barred from campuses—before trusting any news served to me by an algorithm.

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When nuance is lost

Culture wars and the sensationalized news coverage of campus protests in mainstream media.

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