On February 24, 2022, President Vladimir Putin announced “a special military operation” and invaded Ukraine after weeks of gathering Russian troops along the border. Ukranians were panicking and gearing up to either fight or flee. Me? I was sitting in bed, doing homework late at night, watching CNN, and posting screenshots of New York Times articles on my Instagram story. 

I was thinking things along the lines of what a lot of teenage Americans were thinking: “wow, I can’t believe how evil Putin is,” or maybe, “If I read the New York Times and repost things on social media, I’ll seem (and therefore be) knowledgeable and responsible,” and, of course, the somewhat joking but also serious speculations on a nuclear World War III. 

While the conflict, for now, is unlikely to severely impact the lives of everyday Americans, we still need to keep ourselves informed to understand the fundamental qualities of democracy and freedom that are being overrun in Ukraine. But it’s very difficult for Americans to really be informed on and talk about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine responsibly considering the U.S.’s own history of invasion and attack on civilian areas such as in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the great difficulty of finding responsible and unbiased media coverage. Nevertheless, it is still important to go out and learn from several reputable and reliable sources. 

To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about Russia’s invasion in the context of the U.S. ‘s history of invasion until my English teacher, Mr. Javier, brought it up in a conversation we were having as a class about the conflict.

Intrigued by what he had said, I interviewed him to get a deeper understanding: “It’s imperative for Americans … to be reminded of our own history of invasion,” he said. “We ourselves are invaders. We invaded Iraq by duping the American public into believing that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and this was a coordinated deception.”

The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 for a few reasons, including disarming “Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people,” according to President George W. Bush’s radio address to the people in March 2003. Another motivation for the invasion was, of course, punishing Al-Qaeda—the terrorist group based in Iraq responsible for 9/11. But it was later found that Iraq had never possessed nuclear weapons, nor had Hussein ever had an operational relationship with Al-Qaeda.

Hussein was an abusive dictator, like Putin, who consistently violated human rights throughout his 24-year regime. But the connection I want to make clear between the invasion of Iraq and the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia is about media coverage. 

For one, the media often got the facts completely wrong. The New York Times was, and still is, one of the American people’s primary sources for news. Throughout the war, they continued to support the justification to invade to disarm Iraq of nuclear weapons. In fact, one of their writers won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on terrorism in Iraq, and later reporting of hers was found to be factually inaccurate. 

Furthermore, according to a feature story reported by UC Berkeley NewsCenter, television news viewers were far more likely to be pro-war during the Iraq invasion, which shows the power of the media whether it is striving to hold viewers and make money or to actually uncover and report the truth.

Since the start of Russia’s invasion, several “trustworthy” news outlets including CBS, French network BFMTV, and even Al-Jazeera—an international news network I have come to rely on to balance my consumption of American media—have had to apologize for statements that were clearly unsupported and bias, according to Axios.

These biased statements, particularly about Ukrainian refugees compared to Middle Eastern and other non-white refugees reflect “the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America,” said The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association. “It dehumanizes and renders [non-white refugees’ experiences] with war as somehow normal and expected.”

In 2021, the U.S. was ranked 44th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, an organization focused on safeguarding and reporting on the right to freedom of information, citing widespread misinformation and distrust of mainstream media as well as the relative disappearance of local news. Norway was ranked first for the 5th year in a row. Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Jamaica also landed in the top 10. The U.S. has the highest GDP in the world and has the highest government spending in the world, but clearly money doesn’t solve our problems. 

If Americans don’t trust mainstream media, they go to social media, where misinformation is rampant. On social media, Americans just see headlines, videos, and quotes from accounts they either follow or were recommended, and have no intent of checking the reliability and accuracy of what they see. After all, many resort to getting their news from social media because it’s easy to access and so that they don’t have to think too hard about it.

As Mr. Javier put it, it’s important “to pursue nuance in thinking about this conflict because it’s not so cut and dried—it’s not so black and white. The bad guys and the good guys are not so clear cut and loyalties really boil down to so many different factors that average Americans are unable to comprehend because of the coverage of a conflict.” 

The best we can do is go to lots of different sources—local, mainstream, national, and international—to get our news with the intention of forming our own accurately informed and independent perspectives, not perspectives shaped by the one or two news outlets we always rely on.