Guest contributor

Fergus Harlow

The Western press is facing a decades-long crisis of objectivity. Lack of time, expertise and other resources have eroded the depth of inquiry for which journalism was once known, often replacing it with rhetoric and hyperbole.  

According to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, 88 percent of journalists surveyed described alarming declines in both funding and profits. This deterioration has arguably impacted the quality of news and weakened public confidence in the industry. 

In 2003, 80 percent of U.K. voters trusted the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to be objective; today, that figure has plummeted to just 38 percent, with problematic political coverage cited as the primary cause. 

In 2024, a team of 40 lawyers and scientists headed by Trevor Asserson determined that the BBC had breached its own editorial guidelines over 1,500 times in its reporting of the Gaza conflict. 

While broader research shows a Western media bias in favour of Israel, one of Asserson’s findings is notable: the BBC persistently refused to define Hamas as a terrorist organisation, just as the international press has refused to label the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) a terrorist organisation. 

There is also growing concern over foreign influence in British media, something that extends beyond the financing of political content online. Last year, the U.K. government directly intervened to block the sale of two prominent news outlets to foreign owners, having previously accused two others of functioning as instruments of the Saudi state. 

Yet more insidious than foreign influence or financial constraints is journalism’s internal culture. In a recent piece for Australia’s The Ethics Centre, Ruby Hamad observes that Western journalists “equate their own interpretations as fact” and that journalists are “ostracised by their peers for daring to critique their own.” This mindset has profoundly shaped international coverage of Burma’s democratic transition.    

Journalist Michael Parenti dissected this issue decades ago in his book Inventing Reality, exposing how one biased news report is used to substantiate another, creating a closed, self-referential loop of influence that directly impacts public policy. 

Today, this manifests in a small circle of well-paid but disconnected intellectuals who recycle vague, unfounded criticisms of Aung San Suu Kyi that, through repetition, have become accepted truths. 

For instance, Western journalists insisted that Aung San Suu Kyi was “silent about the Rohingya” simply because she didn’t say what they wanted to print, and instead of reporting her actual statements, they ignored them entirely. 

Similarly, they claimed she “defended the military at [The International Court of Justice at] The Hague” when in reality, she defended Burma’s right to investigate and prosecute atrocities internally. 

Critics argued that she “condoned” military actions, when in fact, she was mandated by an overwhelming democratic majority to engage in a power-sharing arrangement with an autonomous military.

In my own work, I’ve countered these clear distortions through over half a million words of Aung San Suu Kyi’s, a figure that doesn’t include translations of every campaign speech in Burma, or the 30 plus feature-length interviews conducted by my colleague Alan Clements. 

Many of these interviews were conducted with key figures in the National League for Democracy (NLD) party at the epicentre of inter-communal riots.   

Yet, Michael Safi’s 2017 Guardian article alleged that Aung San Suu Kyi was “under pressure to halt military clearance operations in Rakhine State.” Safi omitted all details of the constitutional constraints that left her powerless over the military’s response. 

The article casts doubt on Burma’s designation of ARSA as a terrorist group, but worse still, it fails to provide a source for where this “pressure” on Suu Kyi originated, leaving the impression that it was Safi’s own conjecture.  

Likewise, Ben Rhodes’ 2019 article, What Happened to Aung San Suu Kyi?, demonstrated an intricate understanding of Burmese politics yet still inserted the claim that “Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t do much for the Rohingya.” 

Rhodes ignored her efforts to establish education, healthcare, and employment programmes, her repeated call for Rohingya citizenship rights “in line with international standards”, her commissioning of a year-long independent investigation chaired by renowned former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. 

At its core, Burma is engaged in a battle for narrative control. 

When Aung San Suu Kyi declined a U.N. fact-finding mission into the Rohingya crisis, it was not out of fear that “the truth would be discovered”, as Burma Campaign UK Director Mark Farmaner suggested. 

It was because the U.N. consistently refused to acknowledge the inter-communal nature of the conflict, and Suu Kyi understood that the U.N.’s narrative, which echoed the mainstream Western press, was making the violence worse.

The truth is, these narratives are not objective facts. They are interpretations, judgements, and assumptions designed to shape perceptions and policy, with real-world consequences that are Kafkaesque. 

Consider a recent court case in Argentina seeking international jurisdiction over alleged atrocities committed against the Rohingya in Burma. 

Aung San Suu Kyi, a 79-year-old woman already imprisoned by a ruthless junta on politically motivated charges, held incommunicado in an undisclosed location where she is denied access to family or legal counsel, is issued an arrest warrant for an unspecified crime that she cannot defend herself against. 

The investigative research conducted by myself and Alan Clements was submitted to this case to refute claims of Aung San Suu Kyi’s complicity. It outlined, in meticulous detail, her point-by-point response to the Rohingya crisis. 

But the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK), which filed the case, is itself engaged in narrative warfare, having built support for their case through the public vilification of a woman who was neither present nor in control of the crimes they claim to seek justice for. 

Yet when the Argentine court ruled in their favour, issuing 25 arrest warrants, BROUK suddenly claimed that the court had made the decision to include Aung San Suu Kyi without them. 

Perhaps, when BROUK filed the case in 2019, they assumed that the supposed “complicit” defender of the military would be treated favourably if her civilian government were to be overthrown. 

Or perhaps they merely exploited her global renown to amplify their case in Western circles, where the name “Min Aung Hlaing” carries no weight. 

In either case, Aung San Suu Kyi’s true crime is her global celebrity, not her politics. Her trial is a trial by the media, and her circumstances are not justice but a travesty.  

These court proceedings in Argentina seeking international jurisdiction rarely, if ever, go to trial. Without a trial, and without the means of responding to the warrant issued, such a system risks undermining the fundamental principle of burden of proof. 

More chillingly, the decision to issue arrest warrants for Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, also being held in prison by the junta, reflects the worst excesses of “cancel culture” – where the accusation itself becomes the evidence.

What these events in Burma show more generally is that when journalists prioritise the narrative over the facts for the sake of a story, objectivity is not the only casualty. 

Journalists, like other writers, should not strive for false neutrality. They should have a clear voice, be partial but transparent about their perspectives, and take responsibility for the real-world consequences of their reporting. 

Because when storytelling takes precedence over facts, what’s ultimately at stake isn’t just objectivity – it’s integrity, and justice.  

Fergus Harlow is a writer, scholar, and human rights advocate. He is the Director of the Global Campaign UseYourFreedom.org, which calls for the release of unlawfully imprisoned State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and all democratic leaders in Myanmar. He co-authored Burma’s Voices of Freedom and Aung San Suu Kyi From Prison and a Letter to a Dictator with Alan Clements, providing an in-depth exploration of Myanmar’s political crises and the resilience of its people.

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