The Western Media's Empathy Problem
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As Russia’s war of aggression rages on in Ukraine and as Ukrainian soldiers and civilians-turned-soldiers throw up a mighty and inspiring resistance, a whole lot of readers, commentators, journalists, and observers are noticing something of a difference between how Western media outlets are covering this conflict and the ensuing refugee crisis, and how they’ve covered conflicts and refugee crises in the recent past — when those crises have been in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, or Latin America. This map has been making the rounds on Twitter, and it strikes me as more or less correct:
Part of this makes sense: Proximity is key to coverage, and every media outlet is going to cover nearby stories with greater interest than farther-away ones. And proximity can be physical or it can be psychic: For many Americans, Europe feels closer than Africa, Asia, or even Latin America thanks to a whole set of factors that include, but aren’t limited to, race and religion: our colonial roots are British; a majority of our population descends from Europeans; we share significant linguistic, cultural, military, diplomatic, political, and economic ties; and more Americans visit Europe each year than travel to any other continent. There’s also the simple fact that the US has a decades-long rivalry with Russia, for years our only challenger to the claim of being a singular Great Power and more recently a main character in domestic political disputes.
There’s also the surprise factor. To use an old cliche, man bites dog is a story, dog bites man is not. While journalists who express shock and dismay at a war in Europe are getting rightly pilloried online, part of the story here is that lay Americans (and a troubling number of journalists and politicians) tend to see “Africa” or “the Middle East” as one big block, and read a general sense of things into the entire region. So even if individual countries have been peaceful and stable for years, many countries in the Middle East have not been peaceful or stable, and so the general sense of things is that the Middle East is enmeshed in unending conflict and has been that way for as long as any of one of us has been alive; the general sense of things is that “peace in the Middle East” is a desirous but likely unattainable goal. And so your average American (or, I would guess, European) reader is not surprised to hear that a country like, say, Syria has fallen into civil war, even while people who have lived their entire lives in Syria are very shocked and surprised that Syria has fallen into civil war. There is a flattening of individual countries with individual histories down into broader and more surface understandings of an entire region, and widespread ignorance about America’s role in any of these amorphous and psychically distant conflicts.
The same generalized sense of things happens in Europe, which is broadly — and not wrongly — understood by Americans as a peaceful place. Yes, Europe has an extremely bloody history and there have been wars in Europe even since the last great war, most notably the conflict in the Balkans, which was itself met with shock and surprise, and just a few years ago, thousands of people were killed in the war in the Donbas region in Ukraine; Russia also invaded Georgia just a few years before that. So Europe has not been conflict-free. But for the most part, Europe (and particularly the Western part of the continent) has enjoyed a period of nearly unparalleled peace since the end of World War II, and has put into place a series of institutions and ties to help maintain that peace. The tens of millions of Americans who (pre-pandemic) travel to Europe annually largely did not visit war zones, or countries adjacent to war zones, or countries that they feared could become war zones. The general sense of things is “Europe is a safe, secure, and peaceful place.” And while that has not been 100% true for 100% of Europe 100% of the time since World War II, it has generally been true for the vast majority of the continent for the period in which the vast majority of people on Earth have been alive. So you can forgive people, I think, for finding the Ukraine conflict surprising, and you can forgive — and understand — the Western media in covering it accordingly.
What does not need to be understood or forgiven, though, are the subtle and not-so-subtle suggestions that Europeans are simply a naturally more peaceful people than those in Africa or the Middle East, or the double standards for which refugees are being accepted with open arms and which found themselves facing closed doors.
And this especially can’t be ignored when it comes from political leaders and from journalists and media outlets. Yes, there are perfectly good reasons why media outlets are covering a conflict in Ukraine with greater depth and more airtime than they would a conflict in Myanmar or Chad. There are not good reasons why any professional journalist should be on television or in print suggesting that Ukrainian people are more “civilized” than people in Asia, the Middle East or Africa; there are not good reasons why policy-makers and even individuals are more sympathetic to blond-haired blue-eyed refugees than to brown-hair brown-eyed ones. And no, “the blue-eyed ones are more likely to be educated professionals” isn’t a good reason (and I’m not even sure it’s true); the whole point of refugee admissions is to give people safe harbor when they need it, not to evaluate them for deservedness.
Maybe it’s human nature to see people who look and live like you and find yourself more sympathetic to their plight. I would guess that a lot of middle-class white Americans can imagine themselves in the shoes of a middle-class white Ukrainian, but would struggle to do the same with a Syrian or Afghan or Somali, even if they shared class status with that Syrian or Afghan or Somali. How many Americans can even imagine what “middle-class” might look like in Syria or Afghanistan or Somalia? Ukraine, though — there’s a general sense that it’s a European country, and so middle-class life there is probably something like middle-class life in the UK or France or Italy, which is to say not so different than middle-class life in the US (whether that’s accurate is of course a very different question). Or maybe, if you are white and most of your family is white — the case for the majority of Americans — it’s just easier to look at a scared Ukrainian kid and see your child’s face, or see yourself reflected in an image of a school teacher weeping as she goes off to war or a man leaving his babies with a stranger so they might find safety while he stays to fight.
These moments of empathy are natural, human, and beautiful; the problem isn’t their existence but their limitations. And perhaps (probably) it’s also the case that a Black mother is more likely to see her own child’s face when she looks at pictures Trayvon Martin or Elijah McClain, imbuing their murders a deeper resonance, a more cutting pain, and a more profound fear than a mother whose child is blond-haired and blue-eyed. It is perhaps (probably) the case that many responsible liberals felt more sympathy for the immunocompromised woman who died of Covid despite being vaccinated than for the vaccine-denying right-wing radio host meeting the same fate. To be sure, there are power dynamics at play in both of those examples that don’t make them perfect comparisons. But I think it’s pretty clear that, for most humans the world over, when we feel that people are like us, whether that’s believing like us or behaving like us or looking like us, we feel for them more.
That’s also pretty fucked up. It’s not an impulse we should accept. And our empathy can be much more expansive, if we choose to expand it.
We cannot all care about all bad things at once, or even about all bad things in perfect proportion to their badness. We share this globe with 7 billion other people, and unimaginable tragedies shake millions (billions?) of lives every single day. Individually, we lack to the capacity to even understand so much suffering, let alone care as much as we should. Individually, we triage.
And so it is the job of a journalist, I believe, to help to close some of these gaps — to help expand a reader’s imagination of what their life could be; to widen out their lens of who they consider to be “like them;” to lengthen the list of what a reader cares about. That’s where I am frustrated by the less-responsible coverage of Ukraine — the coverage that seeks to make Westerners care because Ukrainians look like them, and does so by contrasting Ukrainians and Ukraine with Black and brown people in, as Trump famously smeared them, “shithole countries.” You can encourage caring and empathy without intentionally placing other groups of people outside of your zone of interest, and without feeding into racist myths and flat-out lies.
But here’s the thing: It’s not just journalists; this is a reader problem. Foreign correspondence is at a crisis point: Newspapers are cutting their foreign offices; measurable clicks mean that editors can see just how much most Americans truly don’t give a damn. I’m watching lots of big names on Twitter lament the lack of coverage of conflicts outside of Europe that are just as devastating for the people whose lives they destroy, and I’m wondering: Where have you been?
The truth is that journalists the world over are out there covering conflicts that the Western public largely ignores. They’re risking their lives, going out unarmed and hoping that will be enough to keep them safe. Some don’t come back. Many of those who do spend a lot of time jumping up and down screaming for the world to pay attention, and their editors — who may also really want the world to pay attention — can see exactly how many people are taking notice.
If readers were as engaged with stories of non-European conflicts as they are with Ukraine, have no doubt that those conflicts would get more coverage. Readership is obviously not the only or even the primary thing driving coverage — if clicks were the only thing of import, the front page would be kitten photos, pornography, and celebrity news. Editors make decisions about what they believe the public needs to know.
But publications also take into account what the public seems to want to know. You, reader, vote for the news you get with every click.
I’m watching the Ukrainian refugee crisis play out in the immediate aftermath of the Afghan one, a refugee crisis caused directly by the United States. I’m feeling frothing rage at the border guards in Ukraine reportedly blocking Africans from getting outta dodge; I’m feeling frothing rage at the European countries that have spent years consigning migrants to be tortured in Libyan jails or die at sea or live on the street instead of allowing them in, and that now are putting out the welcome mat for Ukrainians. Great that they’re putting out the welcome mat, truly — Ukrainians deserve it. But so did Syrians. Great that talking heads and keyboard warriors and domestic policy armchair analysts are sounding the alarm about the Ukrainian refugee crisis — Ukrainians deserve it. But so did Afghans.
And at least on the left, the relief of Biden ending the war in Afghanistan brought with it a broad refusal to really reckon with the total chaos of the withdrawal, and the fact that there simply was no plan to evacuate all of the Afghans who needed to get out to save their own lives. A makeshift, hectic, and still-incomplete strategy was put in place only after a bunch of journalists, veterans, embassy and NGO workers started screaming their heads off about all the people being left behind — and they were generally called warmongers for their efforts. The fact that thousands of Afghans did get out of the country is testament to the efforts of the folks who refused to shut up and who hammered American politicians with everything they had; it is not, in fact, thanks to the administration’s pre-planning. And Biden could have opened America’s doors to many more Afghans in need. He chose not to. Progressives have largely shrugged.
The Afghan refugee crisis is still ongoing. In Kabul, right now, the Taliban is going house to house in search of traitors to jail, torture, and possibly kill. They will no doubt end the lives of some people the Biden administration simply chose not to help, while self-styled progressives offered the administration nothing but flattery and thanks for withdrawing — never mind the ugly details.
There is much more that the Biden administration could have done for the most vulnerable Afghans along with ending the war. They simply chose not to, because of a lack of interest or a lack of empathy or a refusal to spend some imagined political capital on other people from over there. And many of the same people who are now mad about European hypocrisy don’t seem to feel much shame at their own.
All of which is to say: If you find yourself inspired by Ukrainian bravery, anxious for the well-being of the many Ukrainians being driven from their homeland, and hopeful that your country will do all it can to help the fighters defend themselves and the vulnerable find safety — good. That is a good thing to feel. It is how any decent person should feel.
If you’re also angry at the hypocrisy of so many nations and so many individuals in their treatment of Ukrainian refugees compared to their treatment of refugees from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East — good. That is a good thing to feel. It is how any decent person should feel. But take a look in the mirror, too (for the record, I include myself in the category of people who needs to do some good inward-looking on this one).
And if you’re flummoxed by what seems like disparities in coverage, good — take a look at your own subscriptions, your own reading habits, and your own clicks.
It’s easy to talk about “the media” as a cohesive whole, a singular powerful entity. But “the media” is an ecosystem, and the reader is a part of it. The same is true of politics: Yes, there are the powerful decision-makers, but their decisions are not made in vacuums; decisions hinge at least in part on where, when, and why the public raises a collective voice. At these moments of crisis and human suffering, each of us have an opportunity to reflect on our own role — how we use our own voices, our own dollars, and our own power, no matter how small and limited. How much do you show that you care about the things you say you care about?
xx Jill
Photo by Max Kukurudziak on Unsplash