The unconfirmed and highly unlikely story about a niqab-attired woman speaking Welsh has spread across media both social and traditional, and it got me thinking about how much of the news in our highly polarized society is given contrasting narratives that serve to confirm the pre-existing biases of their audiences.
Yesterday I heard two such divergent narratives on the story of the fatal nightclub shooting in Orlando. One radio network described the suspect in a story as "pledging allegiance to ISIS and inspired by the terror attack in Paris" without any mention of his history of personal relationships, while another network said "there is no evidence he was in contact with overseas terror networks" and described the suspect as "someone who may have been conflicted about his sexuality."
These narratives appeared to be tailored to the different audiences of the two networks, and whether the reporters did so consciously or not, journalists and historians ultimately do a disservice when they avoid including information that does not conform to their or their audiences' biases. It's not all that different from Lucian's critique of historians from more than 1800 years ago.