The Western Media Is Proving It's Propaganda

There was a point in my life where I stopped trusting that what I was being shown was simply information. I started to see it for what I think it actually is: propaganda, dressed up as neutral content.

I want to be clear before I say anything else. I'm not here to defend the actions of the country I live in, and I'm not here to defend Russia either. I live in the United States right now, but that doesn't mean I agree with the wars this country has started, the lives that have been lost because of its foreign policy, or the way many politicians and institutions seem willing to place the interests of other countries above those of their own citizens.

Whether that's driven by lobbying, political influence, campaign financing, or other forms of power, I've come to believe that money and influence play a much larger role in shaping government decisions than the public is often led to believe. I don't have some hidden loyalty to a side. Honestly, I don't have much of an opinion on the geopolitics itself at all, because to me it reads as a chess game played by people who inherited wealth, power, and position from those who came before them. I wasn't born into any of that. I didn't inherit anything. I'm not one of the people this game is being played for or by.

What I actually want to write about isn't the war itself. It's the system around it. Specifically, the media and search propaganda system, and what I personally witnessed watching it operate in real time over years.

When the war in Ukraine began, and for years afterward, every time I searched anything related to it, I kept seeing the same handful of narratives placed directly in front of me.

Russia is in trouble. They're crumbling. Putin is losing power. Russia is being destroyed. Russians are revolting.

Western Media

Over and over, search after search, year after year, this was the story being handed to me.

Now it's five years later. And none of that happened the way it was framed. Putin is still there. Russia didn't get destroyed. The Russian people didn't rise up and overthrow anything. Whatever changed, it wasn't the collapse that was being promised to me, repeatedly, every time I looked something up.

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a comment on the war itself, and it's not me taking a side or defending any country or any leader. I genuinely don't know enough, and I don't think I need to.

What I'm pointing at is narrower than that. It's the gap between what I was shown, consistently, for years, and what I later observed to actually be true. That gap is what stayed with me. Not who's right in the war. Just the fact that the story I kept being fed didn't match what eventually played out, and I noticed it happening to me directly, search after search, for half a decade.

More recently, I found myself thinking about this again while watching interviews with North Korean defectors talking about their lives in North Korea and after arriving in South Korea. As someone of South Korean descent, I found these interviews fascinating. They spent a great deal of time talking about how terrible life was in North Korea and how they had been brainwashed by the regime. Listening to them, I understood why they felt that way. But at the same time, another thought entered my mind.

I began wondering whether they had really escaped propaganda altogether, or whether they had simply entered a different version of it.

When I listened to many of these interviews, I noticed that after arriving in South Korea they were immersed in an entirely different media environment. They were surrounded by television, advertising, celebrity culture, political narratives, and entertainment that constantly reinforced a particular image of South Korea and the modern world. I found myself asking whether they had traded one carefully constructed narrative for another.

One thing that especially stood out to me was the constant celebration of Korean pop culture, particularly groups like BTS. From my perspective, these groups are presented as symbols of South Korea's success and global influence. Everywhere you look, there are stories about how the entire world loves them, how they represent Korea, and how they have become global cultural icons.

Watching this, I couldn't help wondering whether this was also a form of narrative building. To me, it appeared that entertainment wasn't just entertainment anymore. It had become part of a country's soft power—its ability to shape how both its own citizens and the rest of the world perceive it through music, movies, television, and celebrity culture. Even the name "BTS" is English rather than Korean, something I personally found symbolic of how modern South Korea presents itself to a global audience.

What struck me wasn't whether BTS deserves its success or whether people genuinely enjoy their music. People are free to like whatever they like. What stayed with me was the broader pattern. The defectors escaped a system where they believed they had finally found complete freedom, yet I found myself wondering whether every society constructs stories that its people eventually accept as normal.

North Korea tells one story about itself. South Korea tells another. The United States tells another. Russia tells another. Every government, every major media system, and every powerful institution has incentives to shape public opinion in ways that benefit its interests. The methods are different, the messages are different, and the consequences are different, but the desire to influence people seems remarkably universal.

That realization changed the way I consume information.

Today, I try to question everything I see, regardless of where it comes from. I don't automatically trust American media because it's American. I don't automatically trust Russian media because it's Russian. I don't automatically trust South Korean media because of my heritage. I assume every source has its own incentives, its own biases, and its own preferred narrative.

I'm no longer interested in choosing sides. I'm interested in recognizing the existence of narratives themselves.

That's what stayed with me after years of watching coverage of the Ukraine war, and it's what I thought about again while listening to North Korean defectors describe their experiences. Whether the subject is war, politics, entertainment, or national identity, I increasingly find myself asking the same question:

Am I seeing reality?

Or am I being shown the version of reality that someone else wants me to see?