Hierarchy of death = generally, white-Caucasian deaths command a lot more attention, ( “missing white woman syndrome” is a well known thing; a missing white girl gets 100x the attention of a kidnapped black boy ), Western deaths or wars get a lot more attention than non-Western deaths or wars - just look at how much attention the London bus bombings or Paris terrorist attacks got compared to the countless suicide bombings and other attacks in the Middle East - and rich people/nation’s woes get a lot more attention than poor people’s or poor nation’s.
The problem has been well-known for many years, but it doesn’t look like it’s ever going to change. Should a war involving, say, Sierra Leone, Uzbekistan or Eritrea get the same coverage and attention as a war involving Ukraine? Should a kidnapped black man get as much attention from the public and media as a kidnapped white woman? What exactly would such media coverage look like?
Given how the US media works (i.e. motivated by profit), it makes perfect sense within that framework that the news items mot heavily presented are the ones that will bring in the most revenue. So your typical capitalist would argue that the media is working the way it’s supposed to.
Which to me exposes the flaw in the model where media’s motivation is maximum monetary return.
Yeah, the problem isn’t the media telling the people what they want. It’s the people telling media what they want. MWWS is a thing because it brings in the ratings, which brings in advertisers, which pays for the media empires. If the neutral media covers stories that consumers don’t care about, consumers switch over to the popular media which has the stories they do care about, and those neutral media companies go out of business.
Some of the media companies which don’t have a funding model dependent so dependent on audience numbers do cover these other stories more evenly. Some of the world news media companies will have more even coverage of these kinds of events. But media companies in the US are generally supported by advertising revenue, and that’s maximized by having as large of an audience as possible. If an individual wants more even coverage of the news, it’s out there if they seek it out. If enough people turn to these other media channels for more broad coverage of the news, then the main media companies will the same in an effort to gain that audience.
in the instance of Ukraine, I don’t think that it is a problem. The coverage is justified. Now, it’s possible that I’ve ignored conflicts that are huger than Ukraine, due to them not getting media coverage, but the only one that I can think of that didn’t receive as much attention yet was undeniably as clear-cut and large as Ukraine is East Timor.
Rwanda was as clear cut and large, but it did receive coverage. And not all large European conflicts arouse general sympathy. The war in Bosnia, for instance, had a lot of people saying “why should we care about that? They’ve been fighting each other in the Balkans for centuries.”
So, while the war in Ukraine doesn’t falsify the premise, it isn’t a good test case, either.
Well I don’t think it could ever be perfect. A common sentiment following some crisis being in the news is “more people died in traffic accidents”. So should the news everyday be the same, reporting on big killers like heart disease?
I know this sounds like a tangent, but what I’m getting at is that novelty plus threats to the status quo are some of the most important factors.
And, in the case of Ukraine, we’re talking about the country with the most nuclear weapons (and one of the biggest militaries) trying to annex a more or less free European country – it’s a big shakeup and big news.
Of course that doesn’t excuse racism. News organizations have a reasonability to not pander to existing biases IMO.
Note I’m not saying that they necessarily need to give proportional representation; as already pointed out, they are money-making operations. What I’m saying is, when they do report from a war zone in a majority black or brown country, are they as respectful to the civilians as they would be reporting from a majority white country? When a black person commits a crime do they suddenly switch to words like “savagery”, and a presumption of guilt, when they would not do the same for a white perp? That kind of thing.
Yeah, I think you have to tease out what the potential consequences and impacts are from the coverage. Ukraine is getting a lot of press because it’s Russia fighting a country that NATO supports. There’s small, but real potential that the US and NATO might get dragged into this war. Meanwhile if say… Senegal and Guinea-Bissau got into a war, the impacts and consequences are a lot less to the US, so it probably wouldn’t get nearly so much news coverage. That’s the main difference for the differing levels of news coverage more than anything else.
This dilemma is why Network (1976) is probably my favorite movie.
It shows that journalism driven by the profit motive is not journalism, because of how it inverts the service relationship.
To a modern audience, it seems like grousing about an obvious truth.
But at the time it was released, it was essentially science fiction (for the science of economic anthropology). Viewed in its proper context, it’s an act of prophecy.
I consider it required viewing for anyone interested in the media.
I’d suggest that it is more complicated than that and can’t just be pinned to either race or sex.
One glaring example is the pretty much complete lack of publicity for white men killed by the police.
Their names are certainly not as well known and yet they substantially outnumber the number of black men killed by the police.
Also, an even greater disparity is that men killed by men far outnumber women killed by men and yet you’d never know that judging by the balance of the media output.
I’m not sure exactly why such disparities exist nor what can or should be done about it. Some people harbour political motives for wanting such disparities to exist I’m sure but it seems pretty distasteful.
That’s for domestic consumption and is complicated enough. In the case of wars overseas the picture is a little more obvious. We are pretty much hard wired to care more about people like us. We are all tribal apes at heart. It is no surprise that a small tragedy on our doorstep to people who look and live like us will be of greater impact to us that something on a larger scale much further away.
Media, being what it is, will most likely try to appeal to eyeballs and will carry what they think will be most interesting and impactful. Depressing, but wholly understandable on a human level.
What to do about it? Unless you choose to go full-scale government control or censorship of the media I’m not sure we can do anything about it (and I think to try and do so would be a cure worse than the disease)
IMHO, this has little to do with race. Over the years it’s relatively commonplace when one third world country beats up another one. Since WW2 this is unparalleled unprovoked aggression by a herculean nuclear power, and they’re having a rough time of it. Hence why this is “news”.
If a dog bites a man, that’s not news. If a man bites a dog, now that’s news!
How about the Second Congo War? I only found out about it a few years ago noodling on Wikipedia. I don’t recall it getting much if any attention from western media. Did other Dopers know about it?
We sort of did this in the other thread, but there always is more to these than black/white or rich/poor. There is an interesting hook to it. If a white prostitute gets kidnapped and murdered by a client that isn’t a breaking news story. In this case it is the several things mentioned in the thread: nuclear power, global economic consequences, possible U.S. involvement, personal economic consequences, etc.
Look at the Smith slap to Rock and how much more attention it gets than two other rich guys (white or black) fighting outside a bar. I don’t think there is as much cause for concern in this as some claim.
An African nation launching a war of aggression against another African country without genocidal implications, would typically generate less international angst than Russia-Ukraine, the most basic reason being that the African conflict is unlikely to involve one country striving to attain hegemony over the entire region.
There’ve been instances where seemingly minor African conflicts have sparked international crises (the Congo in the '60s for example) due to major powers taking sides.
The “hierarchy of death” problem as applied to coverage of kidnapped/murdered people is a different matter that can be alleviated somewhat by sufficient attention and scorn directed at the media players. Some stories will always be irresistible. One suspects that the recent case of a black male shooting victim would have received less coverage if the media hadn’t been able to run photos of the attractive blond female suspect in revealing top, covered with blood.
I’ll take it a step further. It should be required viewing for everyone. I think of it as history, it’s a path to understanding how we got here.
And as to “the hierarchy of death”, I went on a little bit of a living room rant a month or so ago.
I was watching one of the network evening news programs after tornados struck a small southern town, killing one person, a woman named Veronica Jones*. Some elected government official, I believe it was the governor but it might have just been a mayor or something, was heartbroken, just heartbroken over this epic tragedy. He lamented the fact that that the life of Veronica Jones was not spared, and his greatest wish at the moment was that he could turn back time and figure out how to save the life of Veronica Jones, because no expense would be too great, no sacrifice too immense, if it saved Veronica Jones.
And I’m like “Unless you had to tell people to wear a scrap of cloth over their mouth for the 15 minutes they were inside the grocery store, right? That would be a bridge too far, even if it saved 20,000 Veronica Joneses in your great state, because freedom, amirite? And how come we aren’t hearing you blabber about how Veronica Jones was old and would’ve died soon anyway and must have had some pre-existing condition that was all her fault that prevented her from outrunning the tornado. Fucking hypocrite.”
*I don’t think the name was really Veronica Jones, but it was something close.
The Second Congo War wasn’t one African nation attacking another African nation. On the side supporting the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, it involved: DR Congo, Angola, Chad, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Anti-Ugandan militias, Anti-Rwanda militias, and Anti-Burundi militias.
They were all opposed to: Rwandan-aligned militias, Ugandan-aligned militias, Anti-Angolan forces, as well as the countries of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.
With a death count of at least 5.4 million, it was the deadliest war since World War II.
During my brief foray into right wing forums there were plenty of such cases cited.
Generally though, they were just used as a counter to the idea that black people are often the victims of police brutality (unsuccessfully IMO… Both because brutality against whites doesn’t disprove brutality against blacks, but also because most of the cited examples were nowhere near as clear-cut as examples like George Floyd).
And I think this relates to one of the big issues: that the news is often trying to tell a particular narrative, and often one that the viewer already subscribes to.
I saw it very clearly when I was living in China. There are a lot of problems in China, sure, a lot of criticisms that I have. But since China has achieved this “chief antagonist” status, there is only one kind of story that you ever hear.
Accordingly, even my friends will often refuse to believe things that I tell them about living in China because china is Mordor.
I don’t think such forums count as the “media” that the OP is referring to.
There is little doubt that in the mainstream media. A black person killed by a policeman gets far, far more attention than an equivalent white person.
Probably true. It is rare indeed that the media tells the full story in an unbiased way and it is left to the individual to uncover the facts and figures behind the headline. If they are curious enough to do so. Often they read a confirming viewpoint from an already favourable source and go no deeper.
Like Simon and Garfunkel said, " a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest"
As far as MWWS goes, I think wealth plays a lot into it. The white women we often hear about come from a wealthy family, they’re going to college, they have a large social network, etc… The whole world is ast their finger tips.
That makes a more “interesting” story than some single mother working at Burger King.
What I meant by mentioning those forums was that they referenced right wing media, not that they were the primary source. And I think we can consider right wing media to be mainstream at this point.
Still, I would agree with you that on most news media, police brutality against blacks gets more attention. But that’s only true now, thanks to things like BLM. It’s an issue that was complained about within the black community for decades, and was absolutely ignored or even ridiculed (just seen as whining by the Bad Guys).
So, in terms of balance, it makes absolute sense to cover police brutality on blacks more; to many people it’s the thing they are coming to terms with and represents an important shift happening in society.
Plus, as I say, most of the most egregious examples do seem to be against blacks anyway. When right wing channels try to find examples of whites being unfairly treated, they seem to be far more equivocal cases IME.
There is probably a lot in the “wealth and connections” angle.
In the UK we had a case not so long ago where young girls were groomed and passed around for sex and raped by a gang of men and though alarm bells were rung at the time very little was done about it and there was not much in the way of publicity either,
The girls were white, poor and often in care, the gang were mostly Pakistani and the case has been made that the authorities were reluctant to act due to fear of accusations of racism and that had the girls been wealthy and from more stable homes more attention would have been paid.
I wish I could find a cite for what I was told in journalism school way back when. In essence, it was a British press lord back in the 1920s addressing criticism that his papers didn’t care about Europe or the Empire. His response was something to the effect of one Englishman equals 50 Frenchmen equals 5,000 Indians. The story was phrased using the ethnic and racial slurs of that time, which makes it even harder to search for a cite.