One story enters three newsrooms. From the first emerges a narrative grounded in reality; from the second, a distorted version of reality; and from the third, a narrative shaped by an agenda before the event even occurred. How can the reader tell the difference?

By Abdullah Al-Omairah

At 8:17 in the morning, the same video reached three newsrooms in three different capitals.

It was a 42-second clip recorded on a mobile phone in a crowded square.

The footage begins with people raising their voices. The front row then suddenly moves, police officers advance, and a man falls to the ground. In the final seconds, an object appears to fly from the edge of the crowd before smoke obscures part of the scene and the recording cuts off.

The video was not clear enough to tell the viewer everything.

It did not show how the gathering began, who pushed first, what the thrown object was, or what happened to the man after he fell.

What reached the newsrooms was part of the incident, not the incident in its entirety.

Yet before the information was complete, the headlines had already begun to take shape.

The First Newsroom

The editor watched the clip once, then replayed it without sound.

He did not search for the most dramatic moment, but for details that could be verified: the building’s façade, the direction of the shadows, a small sign at the edge of the square, and the precise moment when the disturbance began.

He asked:

Who recorded the video?

When was it filmed?

Is this the original copy?

What happened before it began and after it ended?

He contacted the person who filmed it and requested the complete file. He then compared the location with earlier images of the square and contacted the police, the organisers of the gathering, and a paramedic who had been near the man who fell.

Different accounts emerged. They agreed that a crush had occurred and people had been injured, but disagreed over which side had initiated the confrontation.

An hour later, the story was published under the headline:

Crush in City Square as Investigation Seeks Cause of Confrontation

The headline was not sensational, nor did it give the reader an answer the newsroom did not possess.

This was a narrative drawn from reality. It did not claim to represent the whole of reality, but neither did it add anything that had not been established.

Journalism does not transmit events mechanically. It selects details, arranges them and places them in context. Here, however, the selection remained in the service of truth; truth was not turned into a servant of the selection.

The Second Newsroom

In the second newsroom, the editor stopped at the moment when the man fell.

He replayed it three times, then said:

This is the image.

The preceding seconds were removed, and the shot was enlarged until most of the surrounding square disappeared. The reader could no longer see anything except a falling man, a line of police officers and smoke rising behind them.

The image was not fabricated, nor was anyone added who had not been there.

All that happened was that one part of the truth took the place of the whole truth.

The headline read:

Chaos Engulfs the City

The city had not been engulfed by chaos. A disturbance had occurred in one section of a single square. But “the square” was too small to attract clicks, and “a crush” was less dramatic than the idea of a city being engulfed.

This was a distorted narrative.

Distortion does not always require a lie. It may be enough to remove the beginning, magnify one part, and allow the headline to say what the body of the report cannot prove.

A moment then becomes an entire day, a narrow angle becomes a city, a possibility becomes a fact, and the loudest voice is made to represent everyone.

The Third Newsroom

The third newsroom had not been waiting for the story to arrive before deciding its position.

The conclusion was ready; all that remained was to find an image that would serve it.

The editor-in-chief did not ask: What happened?

He asked:

Which part proves what we have been saying from the beginning?

The shot of the thrown object was selected, while the moment when the man fell was removed. An old image from an earlier confrontation was also used because it showed a larger crowd and more smoke, without clearly displaying its date.

The headline read:

Vandals Carry Out Their Plan

The report did not explain what the plan was, who had discovered it, or when it had been devised. Yet it used words that gave the reader the impression that everything was known and that the verdict had been issued before the investigation had even begun.

This was the narrative of an agenda.

It did not begin with the event in order to understand it. It began with the conclusion, then searched the event for something that could serve as evidence.

This is more dangerous than an incidental error. An error can be discovered and corrected, whereas an agenda rearranges its information after every correction until it reaches the same predetermined conclusion.

Three Narratives Before One Reader

At 9:09, the three reports arrived on the phone of a single reader.

The first said an investigation was underway to determine the cause of the confrontation.

The second announced that chaos had engulfed the city.

The third asserted that vandals had carried out a plan.

Three narratives about 42 seconds.

The reader studied the headlines for some time, then asked:

How can a single event be uncertain in one newspaper, a catastrophe in another, and a fully formed conspiracy in the third?

He did not choose the narrative that agreed with his existing position. Instead, he opened all three reports and began working backwards: from the headline to the story, from the story to the image, and from the image to the original footage.

He noticed that the first account stated the time and location of the incident, distinguished between what sources had confirmed and what remained under investigation, and attributed every statement to its source.

In the second, he found a headline larger than the information contained in the report, a short clip repeatedly shown from the same angle, and broad terms such as “the city” and “chaos”, even though the event was geographically and temporally limited.

The third account claimed to know intentions and plans but did not explain how it had acquired that knowledge. Its language resembled political rhetoric published before the incident occurred.

The reader then found the full video.

He watched the seconds removed from one narrative and the moments omitted from another. He realised that the most dangerous aspect of some reports is not what they show, but what they decide to prevent the reader from seeing.

An Image Does Not Lie by Itself

The reader returned to the image of the fallen man.

The image was genuine.

Yet it could serve contradictory narratives depending on where the sequence began, which part was extracted, and what caption was placed beneath it.

If the story began with the man throwing an object, what happened afterwards appeared to be a response to an attack.

If it began with his fall, what preceded it appeared to be an unprovoked assault.

If the entire scene was shown, reality appeared more complicated than either narrative. Understanding the sequence did not necessarily absolve either side, but it prevented a verdict from being issued on the basis of half an incident.

An image may be genuine while the narrative in which it is placed is misleading.

The lens records what happens before it, but the editor chooses where the beginning is placed, when the ending is declared, and what remains outside the frame.

Not Every Angle Is an Agenda

That evening, a young journalist entered the first newsroom and asked:

Does simply choosing an angle for a story mean that we are constructing a narrative?

The editor replied:

Yes, but constructing a narrative is not always an act of falsification.

No newspaper can publish everything that happened or give every detail equal space. It must select what is most important, explain its relationship to the surrounding facts, and place it in context.

The difference is not between media that possess a narrative and media that do not. Every media organisation has an angle, priorities and a particular way of arranging information.

The difference is between a narrative that begins with the facts and proceeds towards meaning, and one that begins with the desired meaning and then selects facts to support it.

The first may make mistakes, but it leaves the door open to correction.

The second may use accurate information, but uses it to close other doors leading to the truth.

How Did the Reader Discover the Difference?

The reader was not a professional journalist and had neither a verification desk nor private sources.

But he did not stop at the headline.

He searched for the original source rather than the account that had reposted the material.

He asked whether the video was complete and compared the time of publication with the time of the incident, as well as the headline with the information beneath it.

He examined the verbs being used: “said”, “announced”, “claimed”, “established” and “is believed”.

Professional journalism makes its degree of certainty clear, whereas a directed narrative speaks with greater confidence than its evidence permits.

He searched for the voice that was absent, not merely the one that was loudest.

He noticed that some headlines made claims the body of the report itself did not dare to prove.

He then asked the most important question:

If the adjectives and emotional language were removed from this report, what facts would remain?

In the first narrative, an incident remained that required investigation.

In the second, a genuine incident remained whose scale had been exaggerated.

In the third, nothing remained except a verdict that had existed before the report arrived.

How Does the World Read the News?

The journey of a news story does not end with differences between newsrooms. What the media publish is reshaped once again inside the audience’s mind.

A news story does not enter an empty mind. It passes through culture, upbringing, identity, fears, needs and the degree of trust placed in the source.

In this field, BETH Agency previously conducted two complementary studies. The first examined the effect of culture on how news is received, understood and reinterpreted. The second examined the types of minds that receive news and classified them into four patterns.

The cultural study found that Japanese audiences tend to favour precision and the accumulation of evidence, while Chinese audiences often interpret news through the framework of stability and development. In the United States and Türkiye, meanwhile, news passes to a significant degree through political identity.

Arab audiences are influenced by imagery, belonging and dignity, while Israeli audiences interpret security-related news through an existential mindset that may translate it directly into a daily decision or political position.

In India and Pakistan, language, religion, region and social class redistribute the impact of a story among multiple audiences. Iranian and Russian audiences, meanwhile, continually compare the official narrative with alternative platforms.

The media may therefore broadcast the same story around the world, but the world does not receive it with the same meaning.

The audience does not read a story exactly as it was written; it reconstructs it according to what it fears, what it needs and what it wants to believe.

Which Mind Is the Story Addressing?

BETH’s second study moved from the influence of the wider culture to the nature of the mind receiving the story, classifying minds into four patterns:

The Leading Mind:
It does not merely receive the news. It examines it, extracts its meaning, connects it to the surrounding context, and then influences how others understand it.

The Undecided Mind:
It compares different narratives and has not yet reached a final judgement. Documented information and professional analysis can move it from one position to another.

The Neutral Mind:
It carries no strong prior position and needs a clear context explaining why the event matters and how it relates to its life.

The Hypnotised Mind:
It is captive to an established narrative, source or group. It does not search for truth as much as it searches for what confirms what it already believes, rejecting information whenever it threatens the settled image in its mind.

Professional media address all types of minds, but devote their greatest attention to the undecided and neutral minds because they remain capable of choosing.

Agenda-driven media, by contrast, invest in the hypnotised mind, feeding it what reassures it about its narrative while simultaneously working to increase the number of minds that fall into this category.

The leading mind remains a field of contest because it does not keep what it reads to itself. It redistributes it throughout its surroundings and helps shape the attitudes of others.

The formulation of a news story therefore reveals not only the media organisation’s narrative, but also the mind it seeks to reach and the kind of mind it is attempting to create.

Inside the BETH Newsroom

Before publication, the editor remained in front of his screen, the camera lens open and papers spread around him.

His task was not to capture every passing story or repeat the loudest narrative, but to examine what lay between the lines:

Who selected this information?

What was left outside it?

Did the evidence lead to the conclusion, or was the evidence selected after the conclusion had already been determined?

Does the report explain to the reader what happened, or decide in advance what the reader should feel?

Does the narrative grant the reader the right to understand, or demand anger before knowledge?

The editor could have published faster, but he chose to see further.

In an age when news arrives within seconds, scarcity no longer lies only in information, but in the mind capable of examining it and preventing it from becoming an instrument of deception.

The creative mind is in the newsroom, the lens is open, and the news is being examined between the lines.

Here, I am speaking of journalism that combines professional conduct and ethical responsibility with competence, precision and mastery. Journalism is a responsibility and a body of knowledge, not a refuge for those who possess no profession.

The reader, meanwhile, no longer stands outside the room where narratives are shaped.

The reader has found the door and realised that the protective question is not:

Does the narrative sound convincing?

But rather:

What remained of reality after the media finished shaping it?