Coverage of Ukraine Reveals the Racist Biases of Western Media

While giving significant attention to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, mainstream news outlets have remained relatively silent on conflicts in countries like Ethiopia.

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The war in Ukraine has resulted in nonstop coverage by the majority of Western media outlets. On one hand, this isn’t surprising: The invasion is a terrible event causing massive human tragedy with both immediate global consequences as well as unpredictable and potentially disastrous long-term implications. 

“This type of commentary reflects 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.”

Yet the manner and degree of mainstream, Western coverage has been criticized for displaying racist undertones on two levels. First, the language often used by Western journalists, such as the frequent refrain of the phrase “Europe’s first major land war in decades,” often indicates a sense of shock that something like this could happen in Europe, while implicitly suggesting that wars normally happen in other countries “of a different sort.” Second, there is the level of coverage when compared to other large and deadly conflicts, such as the civil war in Ethiopia, which has been going on since November 2020 and has involved innumerable atrocities, war crimes, famine, and displacement—all while garnering far less consistent media attention. (This is an issue I have written about recently for Al Jazeera, albeit remotely, though having formerly worked in Ethiopia.)

In response to what it labeled as the media’s “implicit and explicit bias” in its coverage of Ukraine, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) released a statement calling on news organizations to be wary of ascribing “more importance to some victims of war over others.” The statement notes a CBS correspondent commenting on Ukraine and Kiev that “this isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan . . . this is a relatively civilized, relatively European [city].”

“They seem so like us,” remarked a writer in the Daily Telegraph, one of the United Kingdom’s most prominent newspapers. “This is what makes it so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations.” Even an Al Jazeera anchor commented: “These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa. They look like any European family that you would live next door to.”

“This type of commentary reflects 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,” the AMEJA statement says. “It dehumanizes and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected.” 

Western media’s tendency to succumb to this sort of bias was critiqued in the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent, co-authored by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. They argued that U.S. mainstream media advanced stories and news reports—in the authors’ terms, “propaganda”—that drew the approval of government and elite interests. Hence the victims of groups or places that showed interest in Westernizing or at least would not challenge U.S. interests would get coverage, whereas the victims of groups or places that undermined Western governmental hegemony and the neoliberal status quo were largely ignored. 

“[W]orthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically . . . they will be humanized [and] their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion,” the authors wrote. “In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.”

There are obvious reasons Ukraine has received more media coverage than other conflicts around the world, including the one in Ethiopia. Russia is a nuclear-armed superpower, for one. The invasion also threatens to draw in neighboring European countries that could escalate it into a global conflict. And, beyond the war itself, it has exacerbated the economic fallout of the pandemic through spiraling gas prices and U.S. inflation rates, now running at a forty-year high.

Nevertheless, when it comes to women victims, for example, it is hard not to conclude that we in the West are nowhere near shaking off some of our previous habits of perception that have characterized conflict throughout the years, whereby a Black life lost or violated isn’t as terrible as a white life lost or violated. In Ethiopia’s conflict, there have been reports of rape being used as a weapon of war. This has garnered some media coverage but gained little traction—certainly in terms of impact on the public mood—compared to coverage of Ukrainian women forced to leave their homes clutching their children’s hands. (There have also been multiple reports of Russian soldiers raping women in Ukraine.)

“The ‘unthinkable things’ that happen in places like Africa are typically reported in terms of issues, numbers, and trends—rather than the people, the emotions, and the lives destroyed,” Moky Makura of Africa No Filter, a group that works to dispel stereotypes about the continent, writes in a recent opinion essay for CNN. Makura notes how at the same time “poverty, conflict, corruption, disease, and poor leadership were the five frames through which most stories are told about Africa.”

I can relate to that from my time freelancing in Ethiopia. It was very difficult to get through to editors—especially those at big-name media outlets—if pitching a story that didn’t conform to those frames of narrative. Non-mainstream and smaller media usually proved more willing for nuanced stories that went beyond established predispositions. Recognizing such double standards in the media—whether steeped in implicit or subconscious racism or not—is crucial if we are to better nourish our empathy and abilities to parse the war in Ukraine and in conflicts occurring elsewhere. 

“The biases that are often present in Western coverage of war and the biases that are making the coverage of this war different both ultimately reflect ingrained assumptions about global power dynamics that are not only morally indefensible, but factually untenable,” argues Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review.

“The war in Ukraine,” he writes, “is a tragic opportunity for the Western press to interrogate and shed these assumptions, an act that, done properly, should not distract from the immense suffering of the Ukrainian people but help us see it even more clearly, in a universal context.”