The ongoing Russian invasion into Ukraine is attracting a media circus and news networks from across the global West are reacting accordingly. As networks continue to update the world about the situation as it unfolds, I can’t help but notice the language that the Western media sources have been using in response. From general hypocrisy to blatant racism, it seems like the media has lost all sense of self-awareness and is just devolving into propaganda.
Some of the language is more coded, like one widely shared video from BBC that featured a reporter commenting, “It’s really emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed.” It came hand-in-hand with commentary from a speaker on BBC discussing the Russian deployment of thermobaric weaponry, “which is a sort of a vacuum bomb, which to be fair the US has used before in Afghanistan, but the idea of it being used in Europe is stomach-churning.” In both of these comments, rhetoric leads the viewer to the conclusion that violence is more upsetting when it’s happening to white people, and can be accepted passively, or even justified, when people of color are the victims.
Racist rhetoric is coming from American media just as much as it is from European, from both sides of the aisle. A clip of a CBS news correspondent is circulating on Twitter, with the quote, “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan who has seen conflict rage for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully — city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it was going to happen.” Eurocentric language has started to use words like “civilized” when referring to wealthy, white, Christian populations, which come with a long list of positive attributions that are intended to mean “whiteness.” Meanwhile, Western media uses terms like “uncivilized” and “third-world” to refer to populations that are not European. Reducing non-European countries to these undesirable traits serves to justify any harm that comes to the non-white non-Christian population because they are somehow lesser or other.
I keep seeing people doubling down on the idea that it makes sense psychologically to be quicker to empathize with someone that looks just like you, but the blatantly racist comments are starting to add up. A news correspondent, this time from NBC, certainly didn’t beat around the bush when she responded to a question about Poland’s policy towards refugees from Syria versus Ukraine; “Just to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from neighboring Ukraine. I mean that, quite frankly, it is part of it. These are Christians, they are white.” And a quote from an MP for the highest-polling party on the Danish right cut right to the chase when he said “As hard and repulsive as we want to be towards migrants from Africa, just as open must our arms be to Ukrainians.” It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to say that these comments are talking about anything other than race.
The media is also quick to touch on the legality of immigration, as seen in a promoted tweet by the Visegrád Group, which depicts a Polish soldier carrying a young Ukrainian girl across the border, “This is how real refugees look like, women and children. It’s a very different picture on the Belarusian border, where it’s mainly Middle Eastern men trying to cross into Poland illegally.” Legality is all too often conflated with morality, so citing immigration in this way is supposed to make the viewer believe that they are in the wrong for trying to escape the same circumstances. The only difference between Ukrainians fleeing violence and Syrians or Yemenis fleeing violence is that the latter don’t have the privilege that comes with whiteness.
For everyone keeping up with current events, be wary of where you get your information, who is saying it, and how they say it. Media literacy is growing increasingly important every day, and the more we pay attention to these kinds of things, the better.
