"Often, what you see in the media is driven by economic forces"
About this Quote
“Often” does a lot of work here, the way a careful historian plants a flag without pretending omniscience. Iris Chang isn’t tossing off a lazy media-bashing line; she’s naming a pressure system. The intent is diagnostic: if you want to understand why certain stories dominate, why some angles get sanded down, why whole communities flicker in and out of visibility, follow the money. Not because journalists are cartoon villains, but because institutions have incentives, and incentives quietly script reality.
The subtext is a warning against the comforting myth that media output is primarily a meritocracy of truth and importance. Chang is pointing to a market logic that rewards attention, speed, and audience predictability. Economic forces don’t just determine which stories get told; they shape how they’re framed, what sources feel “safe,” what nuance gets treated as expendable, and which atrocities are remembered as history versus filed away as “too complicated” for the cycle.
Context matters: Chang built her career excavating suppressed or minimized historical trauma, most famously in The Rape of Nanking, and she watched how gatekeepers, publishers, and mainstream narratives can muffle inconvenient facts. For a historian, media isn’t merely today’s newsfeed; it’s tomorrow’s archive. Her line lands with consequence because it implies that economic incentives don’t just distort the present - they pre-edit collective memory. If profit decides visibility, then justice, reckoning, and even empathy become negotiable line items.
The subtext is a warning against the comforting myth that media output is primarily a meritocracy of truth and importance. Chang is pointing to a market logic that rewards attention, speed, and audience predictability. Economic forces don’t just determine which stories get told; they shape how they’re framed, what sources feel “safe,” what nuance gets treated as expendable, and which atrocities are remembered as history versus filed away as “too complicated” for the cycle.
Context matters: Chang built her career excavating suppressed or minimized historical trauma, most famously in The Rape of Nanking, and she watched how gatekeepers, publishers, and mainstream narratives can muffle inconvenient facts. For a historian, media isn’t merely today’s newsfeed; it’s tomorrow’s archive. Her line lands with consequence because it implies that economic incentives don’t just distort the present - they pre-edit collective memory. If profit decides visibility, then justice, reckoning, and even empathy become negotiable line items.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
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