"Media Bias and Militant Journalism: When the Press Targets Minorities and Christian Peoples" — by Carlo Coppola
La versione italiana di questo articolo è apparsa sul giornale "In Città Giovinazzo" diretto dal prof. Antonio Calisi.
A critical analysis of how a segment of the international press uses omissions, insinuations, and narrative manipulation to target religious communities, national minorities, and peoples of Christian tradition — from Armenians to Serbs, Greeks, and Russians.
In mature democracies, journalism is supposed to hold power to account, inform citizens, and guarantee pluralism. A noble mission. Unfortunately, a significant portion of the international press has discovered a far more exciting purpose: destroying those it regards as ideological enemies — through professional misconduct, below-the-belt attacks, and carefully crafted insinuations.
The mechanism is well-tested. First, choose a target: religious communities, inconvenient minorities, "non-aligned" countries, or individuals who refuse to submit to the established power structure. Armenians, for example — a people with a rich history, a distinct identity, and legitimate historical claims — are sometimes reduced to an awkward footnote, or subjected to frontal attacks on entirely unrelated pretexts.
But Armenians are not alone. Russians, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians: peoples of deep Christian tradition — often rooted in an Orthodox faith that resists easy domestication — are viewed by transnational secularism with barely concealed suspicion, when not outright hostility. Their "fault"? They stubbornly regard their faith, their history, and their cultural identity as values worth defending, rather than embarrassments to be archived. In the agenda of globalized progressivism, these peoples frequently appear under the heading "unresolved problem": too attached to their roots, too unenthusiastic about homogenization, too stubbornly themselves. Which makes them ideal and easy targets for a militant journalism always in search of presentable enemies to hang in the public square — no explanation required. The hack of the moment, a ringleader hiding in the crowd, screams not "Crucify him!" but "Corrupt! Corrupt!"
The preferred method is not outright lying — too risky, too crude. The work is far more refined. Strategic omissions. Calibrated emphasis. Elegant insinuations, circulated not only through the press but whispered as slander in the drawing rooms of polite society. Facts are selected like items from a wardrobe: wear what looks good, leave the rest hanging. When the author is skilled, the result stays formally within the boundaries of legality — while casually grazing defamation. When the craft fails, what was art becomes crime: a poorly woven plot, carried out by people of little culture and purely doxological ideology. Because this particular art demands quality narrative craftsmanship and a certain fundamental callousness.
The rhetorical masterpiece is the reversal of blame: whoever is subjected to a media campaign suddenly becomes the aggressor. Whoever defends themselves is painted as the true defamer. This is journalism as judo — use the opponent's force to throw them to the ground, then proclaim yourself the victim of aggression.
Ethically, all of this is deeply questionable. Epistemologically, it is worse: it corrupts the processes of public knowledge. Ontologically — while we're at it — it artificially constructs a social reality that does not exist. An ambitious operation, carried out on commission.
Professional bodies and courts rarely intervene. Understandably: power tends toward self-preservation, and biting the hand that feeds you remains inadvisable at any latitude. Better to look the other way with Olympian detachment. The result? Journalism stripped of credibility. Public debate impoverished. Citizens left disoriented between analysis, propaganda, and meticulously orchestrated campaigns. Individuals defamed and destroyed.
The solution is as old as the profession itself: critical autonomy — which is all too often absent. We need a journalism that is no megaphone for any settling of scores; that maintains its distance from every form of power; that refuses to become yet another instrument of conspiracies between cliques and corridors of power. Not the media tribunal of adversaries, but — an almost utopian ambition, one must admit — a genuine space for truth and public accountability.
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