With the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, Arab news channel AL Jazeera took a fascinating look at how news media has portrayed this crisis compared to others. There has been outpouring support for Ukrainians on social media and neighboring countries accepting refugees, donations to Ukraine in the forms of money and supplies, and rallies and gatherings across the world to support Ukraine or protest Russia. While the support is enormous, media publicists, journalists, and political figures have been accused of double standards to commend Ukraine's armed resistance but also to underlying a horror at how such conflict could happen to such a "civilized" nation.
The first example comes from a CBS News senior with the comment "This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European." Many have pointed out how this statements contribute to the further dehumanisation of non-white, non-European people suffering under a conflict.
Another example is a BBC host David Sakvarelidze tweeted "It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair and blue eyes being killed every day with Putin’s missiles and his helicopters and his rockets." While many Middle East and African nations have been experiencing this for years.
An English presenter Peter Dobbie describes Ukrainians fleeing the war as, “prosperous, middle class people” who “are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war; 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 along with many other statements or comments go to show how double standard the international law is when it comes to white people versus everyone else.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/27/western-media-coverage-ukraine-russia-invasion-criticism
By: Genevieve Weiss
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