Who do I mean by “we”? I mean everyone, but I want to focus on the US. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but it is true. I am sure you can think of a group right now with a negative image. It could be the US with its police violence, school shooting, and rampant criminals. It could be furries, people who dress up as animals, being pedophiles or into to zoophilia, that is sex with animals. You could even know someone who thinks Muslims are all terrorist or that everything in China is a ripoff and you can’t trust them. We all have this issue.
Someone may reply “Well, we think this for a reason” implying that a majority of said group does it. Usually, this isn’t true though. When looking into this issue it is often because certain groups are portrayed a certain way in the media and by a vocal/visible minority. Now, I want to stress that I say usually. There are some instances where a majority does fuck it up for everyone and adds to the confirmation bias. Then again you have instances like Joey Salads faking “Social Experiments” to try and make groups look violent. Feeding into confirmation bias against specific groups.
What brought this to my attention at first is when I started to teach people English as a second language online. Many of my students wanted to move to the US at first. However, after learning English they thought the country wasn’t safe. In fact, a few of them would message me every day asking if I was still alive. Curious I asked why they thought this. They would say they have been watching or reading our news and can’t believe how dangerous our country is. Stating while their country had crime it was no where near as rampant as the US. Then came the school shootings and police abuse issues. They were so terrified of a country they were eagerly waiting to visit they instead would go to visit the UK or South Africa because they believed them to be safer than the US. A few of my students were actually harmed in South Africa and a few mugged in the UK. They couldn’t believe this happened because of how safe the countries seemed due to their news.
As I stated, they went to these countries where they were harmed because they seemed safe. Where if they went to the US they more than likely would have had no issues. The US’ news constantly displaying horrific and negative things about us actually decreases people desire to come here. When my ex-girlfriend and I were discussing moving in together we were trying to decide on a country. I asked why not the US and she said because it wasn’t safe. My ex was from China. The Chinese news displays nothing but the bad news segments from the US and instances of people saying negative things about China on the news. This led her to believe she will be murdered for being Chinese if she dared to step foot in the US. Now, I know you’re thinking, “Well, the Chinese news media did that!” but we gave them the ammo and footage. What I have found out on many international exchange sites is this isn’t an issue of just China alone. Even India and Japan are displaying news putting the US in bad light. That everyone here is racist, violent, and you will be beaten by the police for breathing.
What can we do though? Well, we can start by spreading actual positive stories on the news again and around social media. Even positive stories like “Restaurant gaining business due to sticking up for gay rights” still has a negative connotation. Sure, it is good news for the business and showing we are going to support a place for sticking up for the rights of others. However, if you notice it also implies there was conflict over gay rights. We need more stories of people being altruistic spread around, at least I think so. If you look at UK news it is usually positive news like more people are owning houses, two lovers meet after years of being separated, couple beaten in homophobic attack, scientist finds gene leading to tanning addiction, 2 teens murdered in London, or how someone helped avert a nuclear crisis. All stories I found at a quick glimpse just now. Where as when I search news in the US I get dead American, detective saying all gays should be dead, 3rd NY police officer committing suicide in 9 days, man arrested outside of NJ elementary school with loaded gun and tons of ammo, and transgender woman murdered in DC. If you notice, while the UK news has negative stories they also have positive stories but on the US side it is pure negativity.
I hear tons of US citizens saying “This country is going crazy” but is it? Where I live there seem to be tons of reported crimes. However, looking into it there are less crimes committed here than London. However, if you go by our local news and London news then we seem to be the more dangerous place. Why do we choose to focus on the negative? Money. People are more likely to watch news that makes them scared or paranoid then they are when there is news that makes them happy and safe. They feel the need to watch the news to learn about the new dangerous drug your kids may be doing. Where as teenage youth group goes in to cheer up sick kids? Nah, no one cares to hear about that here. Due to this news stations run more fear mongering stories to get more viewers and more ad revenue. Of course, I am aware I am repeating nothing new. I just wanted to bring this to light and how it actually is affecting our nation. We lost out on actual engineers and doctors, my students, coming here and potentially making our lives better due to the fear mongering our news does. Now we have the issue of people not wanting to raise families in the US anymore because it isn’t safe. This is what I have heard from numerous people on why they don’t want kids. Anecdotal but still relevant.
What is funny is I remember when this started to happen. When I was in elementary school I had a project where I had to watch the news every day for a month and cover a story on the news. This actually sparked my interest in the news as a kid. When the project was finished I would still watch the news. However, once I entered my 8th grade year the news took a huge negative nose dive, at least locally. I stopped watching the new because it was nothing but fires, murders, rapes, new drug crazes, dangers of the internet, dangers of Xbox Live, and on and on. They aren’t even covering much anymore. Before they did investigative journalism and would expose corruption. Now, they’re not. They will report on a murder for 15 minutes with nothing to say other then “He was (race) (age) and (murdered this way)” the entire time. No clue who did it. No clue why it was done. Just repeating about a murder victim adding nothing new to the story.
This applies to all groups. Just remove the US specific stuff and apply it to your group. If you’re a furry and you wonder why people look down on you remember when a boy was abused at furry parties or Kero the Wolf was caught abusing his dog, video 1 (posted out of order because the second video has more evidence while the first is just claims) , and if so many didn’t block me or were banned I would link to the numerous furries who post on Twitter being pro zoophilia and posting pictures of them having sex with their dogs (my Twitter is messed up). Also, dear god, anyone remember Rain Furrest? Or how male feminist seem to be predators? Don’t forget the Ars Tech writer who was a self proclaimed male feminist arrested for trying to have sex with children but getting caught by a FBI agent instead. Like I said, every group has an image problem. We all have to work on fixing these issues. Good luck to the furry community on that; I have no fucking idea how they are going to do that. Just like I have no idea how gamers are supposed to fix the image that we are everything wrong with the world.
No, I am not going to touch the race issues. Just no. I don’t want to deal with the fallout of that. Oddly enough, despite this being a negative post I would love to see more positivity and try to keep the future ones more positive.
Now, I need to sleep as I am rambling.