Guest Blog Post: Media framing the news out of Ukraine very differently than that from Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan

Dr. Rosemary Pennington

Yesterday morning while I was reading Twitter,  Dr. Rosemary Pennington, associate professor of journalism at Miami University of Ohio, had a great thread on how the news media have framed the story of what is happening in Ukraine so very differently from what has happened in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. She was kind enough to edit her Tweets into this guest blog post. Great reading on a part of this story that doesn’t get enough attention.

Guest Blog Post from Dr. Rosemary Pennington

For the last week, I’ve been sharing information on social media about Ukraine. Most of this information has been authored by other people because, while I have done a lot of reading on the subject of the former Eastern Bloc, I am not an expert on the subject.

What I am an expert in is media representation; specifically, the representation of Muslims and cultures/countries that were once imagined as the Orient in media.

News media and pundits have brought those two things – Ukraine and the representation of the imagined Orient – clashing together this week.

By now, you’ve likely seen video of the CBS reporter who implied Ukraine is different from Iraq or Afghanistan because, unlike those nations, Ukraine is a “civilized” country.

There’s a lot to unpack there.

First, I would turn you onto the Twitter feed of Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a scholar of race and Blackness in the USSR and GDR (socialist East Germany) and a PhD student in the University of Pennsylvania’s History Department. She’s been tweeting about race in Ukraine, but also about the way that Ukraine has been othered, and at time racialized, in the European imagination.

While Ukraine is being embraced right now as European as it fights off a Russian invasion, it hasn’t always been.

Second, this framing – that Ukraine is somehow civilized while MENA nations (Middle East and North Africa) like Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria are not – is Orientalist. It’s Eurocentric. It’s racist.

If we unpack the whole “Iraq and Afghanistan are uncivilized” frame it takes us back to discussions of European and American imperialism and militarism which we, as a collective “West,” have not truly reckoned with.

And, frankly, it is a framing no one needs to make.

We are watching the destruction of a nation on the internet and on TV. It is terrible. There is no need to do some sort of comparison. There is no reason to be racist to make people care about Ukraine. I saw the “Russian warship: Go fuck yourself” video. I saw the hard-core woman tell a soldier to carry seeds so sunflowers will grow when he dies. I watched explosions rip apart cities. How can one be human and watch this happen and not feel? Not care?

You do not need to compare the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of Afghans or Iraqis or Syrians in order to prove Ukrainians are worth protecting or saving. All human life is worth protecting and worth saving.

I almost kept my mouth shut after watching that CBS reporter spew that Orientalist and Eurocentric claptrap. But then – oh, there’s always a “but then” – I saw other reporters use the same sort of language. I saw pundits, not all speaking in English, using the same framing.

So, here I am, yelling into the internet at people who do not pay attention what some academic in Washington, DC, has to say. But, I am a former journalist and a journalism professor. My hope is always that the profession can do better, be better. So I yell.

If we don’t call out problematic, racist, things as we see them, then that framing continues. It’s why those reporters and pundits are so comfortable suggesting that Iraqis or Syrians or Afghans are somehow less human – it’s the implication, even if it’s not the intent – because not enough people have called them out on their dehumanizing coverage of conflicts in those places in the past.

Instead, journalists continue producing news coverage of places  like Afghanistan or Syria that is Islamophobic in nature and which helps fuel anti-Muslim sentiment.

Right before Russia invaded Ukraine, I’d started listening to The Trojan Horse Affair podcast. It deals with a similar issue. Listen to the podcast, if you haven’t. I won’t spoil it. But, the gist is the UK government took an Islamophobic letter at face value and used it to wage a very anti-Muslim campaign of terror against Muslims in the UK.

At the time, this witch hunt had a fair amount of support because of the historic framing of Muslims (and Muslim countries) as somehow less civilized, less modern, less human than non-Muslim countries.

Allowing people to be framed as somehow less human, or less worthy of our empathy and compassion, often means that when violence is committed against them, we fail to speak out. Rather than stand as witnesses to violence, we turn away and pretend we don’t see it.

I watched people talk about The Trojan Horse Affair podcast, particularly those not in my field, saying things like, “How could this happen?” I wanted to yell, “Because you watched 24! Because you bought the weapons of mass destruction lie! Because you believe the Middle East to be unmodern! You have for centuries, fueled by European imperial expansion into the Near, Middle, and Far East.”

How could this happen? How could experienced and educated journalists report on one tragedy – and Ukraine is a monumental tragedy – while dehumanizing the tragedy of certain other people?

Because those people are generally a) brown, b) non-Christian, and c) from non-European countries. That combination has for a very long time been portrayed in political, media, and cultural discourses as though it was foreign. As though the people with those characteristics are others not worth our time, care, or compassion because they are uncivilized and unmodern.

And, for the record, this isn’t some screed along the “Why are we talking about Ukraine and not X other conflict” lines. (Though, I think those are conversations we also have to have at some point.)

This is very much about how reporters are framing a current crisis and how troubling and, frankly, unethical it is to dehumanize one group (or many groups) of people in order to make your point.

It’s also just lazy  journalism.

We should care about the violence in Ukraine because human beings deserve to live in dignity. We should care about the violence in Syria because human beings deserve to live in dignity. We should care about the violence in Afghanistan because human beings deserve to live in dignity.

It has nothing to do with civilization or modernity. (Who gets to decide who is civilized or unmodern anyway?)

It has everything to do with ethics, compassion, and humanity.

There is amazing reporting coming out of Ukraine, but if we don’t call out the racist coverage as we see it, it will continue. And the ethical mandate for journalists to “minimize harm” will be something we can never live up to.

Dr. Rosemary Pennington is an associate professor of journalism at Miami University, where she also serves as the area coordinator of the journalism program. She’s the co-editor of two books from Indiana University Press – On Islam: Muslims and the Media with Hilary Kahn and The Media World of ISIS with Michael Krona.