My Take | Out of sight, out of mind: not all conflicts, and their victims, are equal
- Horrible crises that implicate, directly or indirectly, the former Western colonial powers and/or the US, and are fought on the peripheries of the international system, can be safely ignored, especially if they involve people of darker skin
The constant 24/7 coverage of the war in Ukraine has exposed the “white privilege” and racial prejudice of some Western reporters. Thankfully, their colleagues and critics have called out such moral blindness.
As an editor of The Christian Science Monitor rightly observed, “the world has been stunned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But journalists’ on-air shock and empathy for the fleeing Ukrainians has led some to make comparisons that imply people in other parts of the world don’t deserve the same compassion”.
Moral myopia aside, it seems those journalists so criticised also lack basic historical and factual knowledge about the collapsed societies and countries whose refugees they implicitly suppose are less worthy of global attention.
Talleyrand supposedly said, “It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.” For journalists, it’s worse than poor judgment, it’s factual ignorance. But perhaps you shouldn’t expect too much from hacks like us. Instead of enlightening you, we often just share and magnify your ignorance and prejudices, and call it journalism.
Writing in The Telegraph, Britain’s conservative daily, Daniel Hannan expressed shock and dismay at the sight of Ukrainian refugees: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country … War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations.”
Al-Jazeera has apologised for comments that Peter Dobbie, its news presenter, made on air when he described fleeing Ukrainians as “prosperous, middle-class people,” “obviously” not like refugees from the Middle East or Africa: “They look like any European family that you’d live next door to.”
