‘They seem so like us’: How bias creeps into war reporting

When Mahdis Keshavarz watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold in the news last week, she almost immediately noticed a peculiar sense of astonishment pervading much of the coverage. 

Journalists on air and in print were not only expressing shock that a war like this could happen in a European city, but also comparing it to conflicts in the Middle East in ways Ms. Keshavarz and others found deeply offensive.

One of the first instances came from CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata, reporting from Kyiv: “But this isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose my words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.” Mr. D’Agata has since expressed regret for his words, and apologized.

“I spoke in a way I regret, and for that I’m sorry,” he said in a statement. “You should never compare conflicts anyway, each one is unique.”

A board member of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA), Ms. Keshavarz and others began to hear from members in newsrooms around the world, even as they witnessed journalists from the United Kingdom and France expressing a similar sense of shock that this could happen in a majority-white, European city. 

“We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin,” said Philippe Corbé, a French correspondent with France’s BFM TV. “We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.” According to AFP, the broadcaster said Mr. Corbé’s remarks were “clumsy but taken out of context ... [and] led to the mistaken belief that he was defending a position opposite to the one he wanted to emphasize, and he regrets this.”

During the first week of the invasion, many reporters spoke of being stunned by, as one British headline put it, “an attack on civilization itself.” The implication that war was acceptable in other, less white, parts of the world was not lost on critics.

• Al Jazeera English anchor Peter Dobbie compared the “middle class” Ukrainians with those fleeing conflict in the Middle East or Africa. For its part Al Jazeera apologized, saying “the breach of professionalism is being dealt with.”
• Lucy Watson of ITV news said, “Now the unthinkable has happened to them, and this is not a developing, third world nation; this is Europe.”
• Daniel Hannan, in the British newspaper The Telegraph, wrote: “They seem so like us. That is what makes this so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.”

One of the roles of AMEJA, Ms. Keshavarz says, is not only to bring more diversity into the profession of journalism, but also to uphold its ethical principles of fairness and point out the ongoing problems of both implicit and explicit bias in the news. The association condemned what it saw as “the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.”

“The statement wasn’t in any way an attempt to take away from the suffering that’s happening in Ukraine, or the lack of importance of this political moment – it is absolutely important,” says Ms. Keshavarz, also founder of The Make Agency, a strategic media and public relations firm in New York. “I think that I understand, and we all need to understand, that for Europeans, white Europeans, to see their ethnodemographic group as the majority of people having to cross a border as refugees, that is shocking, because for the first time, they see themselves.”

In the 20th century, of course, Europe was the site of two of the most brutal conflicts in human history – World War I and World War II – including an unprecedented amount of carnage and destruction. In the 1990s, genocide erupted in the Balkan states of Europe. The war broke apart the former Yugoslavia and lasted more than a decade.

“Some people expressed similar shock at the beginning of World War II that a nation with so rich an artistic and cultural history as Germany could start a war,” says John Vile, professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University.

The stunned comments coming from journalists and others over the past week might stem from feelings of racial superiority, he says, even if in an unconscious way. But the current conflict in Europe also has the potential to engulf the world in a global conflagration similar to those in the 20th century, says Professor Vile. “And thus they could signal greater consequences for overall world peace than wars in other areas of the world.”

Journalists, however, have a special role to play as people make informed choices, says Sally Lehrman, chief executive of The Trust Project, an international consortium of news organizations that promotes standards of transparency, accuracy, and inclusion within the profession. 

“Journalists today are generally making an effort to be more inclusive in their reporting and learn how to represent people whose identity they don’t share more fully and honestly in the news,” says Ms. Lehrman. 

The expressions of shock coming from some reporters do, however, demonstrate certain “broken thought patterns that get in their way,” she says. “When we have majority white, middle-class newsrooms, these are the kinds of traps journalists can fall into. Think about the news images we normally see of war and human distress – they’re almost always showing Brown or Black faces. And we rarely see those Brown and Black faces showing joy, success, and accomplishment in the news unless they are held up as an exception.”

“This habit in news coverage reinforces the implicit bias that war and conflict somehow doesn’t ‘belong’ in the European context,” Ms. Lehrman says. “So basically, we in journalism have a lot of work to do.” 

Ms. Keshavarz notes how many of the journalists appeared to know what they were implying, offering caveats about choosing “my words carefully” or being “loath to say.”  

“I think it’s an unguarded moment that we’re seeing,” she says. “They know it’s wrong to say, and yet, how bad can it be? It’s just the truth for them. So it still remains acceptable to make these comparisons, where we’ve decided that it’s expected in the Middle East or in African nations, because conflict and violence is just a natural way of life in these places, because that is just how we are.”

“And that is so far from the truth, because it also absolutely negates even some basic knowledge of what the cities and communities and societies in those regions were like historically – even during the past 20 years before conflict arose,” she says.

“As journalists, it’s really our job to point these biases out,” Ms. Keshavarz continues. “It’s a critical blind spot in the way newsrooms are functioning, and the way many journalists are functioning.”