by Ahmed E. Souaiaia
More than ten years ago, the BBC published a photograph, ostensibly supplied to them by activists, claiming that the photograph was depicting the Houla massacre, allegedly committed by the Syrian government. It turned out that the photo was depicting another massacre that took place in Iraq when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
That not-so-innocent error by the BBC motivated me and several students to embark on a longitudinal study, now in its 10th year, collecting data about the media coverage of the so-called Arab-Spring and other key events around the world. More than 157,835 datasets later, we can reasonably and measurably confirm that there are no “honest” errors when it comes to major news media outlets. The editorial decision is always deliberate and calculated; it is designed to produce specific outcomes. Journalism is not driven by the object truth; it is driven by interests. The media coverage is the output of a determinant system deliberately integrated into political, economic, religious, cultural; combining formal and informal systems that often relegate the truth to an afterthought.
It is true, however, that after the popularization of the phrase “fake news” and its appropriation by dominant social groups holding formal positions of power, the need for building a body of evidence in the magnitude of 150,000 datasets is overindulgence. But nothing makes our endeavor to qualify and quantify media bias and the racist impulse that informs the coverage more of an overkill than the evidence playing itself out on Western mainstream media nowadays. Case in point: reporters for major US TV networks tell their viewers that Ukraine “isn’t a place — with all due respect, you know — like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully too — city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope it is going to happen.”
When some viewers pointed out how terrible what they said was, the same reporter who made the above statement, a day later, “apologized”. He apologized not for the racism that he radiates and that he may not have been made aware of until it was revealed by the horror of war in a country he can relate to. Instead, he apologized for his “poor choice of words”; ignoring the fact that he said in the very same statement, that he has chosen “those words carefully”.
Mainstream media is full of racist, discriminatory content. Some contents are obviously biased. Other contents are subtly biased, revealing the deep-seeded inclination to factor in politics and ideology reflexively. The New York Times, the standard bearer of proclaimed objective journalism, has an established record of deliberate manipulation of headlines and images in news reporting stories. Their coverage of the same event, a journalist killed in a conflict zone, elicit different language: an American journalist is killed covering the war in Ukraine but a Palestinian journalist simply “dies” covering protesters in West Bank. A closer look at the headlines and the images used reveal a deliberate process that edited out the fact that the Palestinian journalist is in fact American and emphasizes the fact that the journalist killed in Ukraine is American. It took the NYT a full day to correct the headline and replace “dies” with “killed”.
The New York Times bias against Muslims is reflected in its coverage of all the wars that took place in Muslim-majority countries and that bias is captured in this ten-year study. And unlike this rare war in Europe, wars and armed conflicts, many of which initiated or provoked by Western actors, in Muslim majority countries have been happening continuously for more than half a century.
Since 1945, all wars involving Western nations were fought outside Europe. About 85% of these wars were fought in the lands inhabited by a Muslim majority or targeting Muslim minorities in non-Muslim majority countries: Afghanistan in the 1980s, Iraq in 1992, Afghanistan in 2002, Iraq in 2003, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Mali, Myanmar, Kashmir, and Palestine, just to mention the most cruel and devastating conflicts that destroyed nations, killed and injured millions, and displaced tens of millions. Many of these wars were not authorized by the UNSC. They were justified by the invading nation-states and their allies as being required for national security concerns—the same claim made by Russia today, which, reasonably, sees Ukraine wanting to bring NATO a stone-through away from Russian homes and a risk to ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, a national security concern, too.
The media coverage exposed encultured racism, discrimination, and bigotry and revealed the media and journalism as systems that are intimately connected to values and aims of a world led by forces that preach equality and deliver cruelty—equality of their own and cruelty for all others.
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* Prof. SOUAIAIA is a member of the faculty at the University of Iowa with joint appointment in International Studies, Religious Studies, and College of Law. Opinions are the author’s, speaking on matters of public interest; not speaking for the university or any other organization with which he might be affiliated.
Corrected headline: