Accord­ing to a recent head­line: “Cov­er­age of Ukraine has exposed long­stand­ing racist bias­es in West­ern media”. The thrust of that and sim­i­lar arti­cles was that reporters not­ing the vic­tims were Euro­peans, rather than peo­ple we nor­mal­ly think of as being refugees, were guilty of racism. As a jour­nal­ist who has cov­ered more than a few con­flicts, I beg to differ.
Apply­ing a term as emo­tive as “racist”, based on what in ret­ro­spect some of the “guilty” con­ced­ed were less than well-cho­sen words, is more than unfair. It mis­rep­re­sents what the reporters in ques­tion are try­ing to do.
How in any rea­son­able assess­ment does not get­ting it exact­ly right by today’s deeply frag­ile sen­si­tiv­i­ties, when you’re endur­ing up to 18 hour work­ing days, sleep­less nights, not sure when or where the next bomb or rock­et is going to hit, amount to racism?
How is it, as one ana­lyst wrote, a clear impli­ca­tion that: “It’s much worse when White Euro­peans suf­fer than when it’s Arabs or oth­er non-White peo­ple. Yeme­nis, Iraqis, Nige­ri­ans, Libyans, Afghans, Pales­tini­ans, Syr­i­ans, Hon­durans — well, they are used to it.”?.
How would you even know the exis­tence, nev­er mind extent of their suf­fer­ing if the West­ern media didn’t report their story?
Anoth­er com­men­ta­tor claimed that: “These com­ments point to a per­ni­cious racism that per­me­ates today’s war cov­er­age and seeps into its fab­ric like a stain that won’t go away. The impli­ca­tion is clear: war is a nat­ur­al state for peo­ple of col­or, while white peo­ple nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tate toward peace”.
Jour­nal­ists cov­er­ing con­flicts might not — nay, do not — always choose words and phras­es that are exact­ly right. But the colour, eth­nic­i­ty and reli­gion of vic­tims doesn’t mat­ter a damn to me or any of my fel­low jour­nal­ists who’ve report­ed on con­flicts and suffering.
What mat­ters is that the inno­cent vic­tims are peo­ple who did not ask for and do not deserve what is hap­pen­ing to them.
Our job is to the best of our abil­i­ty con­vey the mes­sage “this is wrong”, to make it impos­si­ble for politi­cians and the pub­lic to say “we didn’t know”. And to steal a line from the Bea­t­les: “You know it don’t come easy…”
Like every jour­nal­ist I know who has cov­ered wars and refugee crises, I have stood in the mid­dle of them fight­ing back tears and on occa­sion, shed­ding them. Then tak­en a deep breath and got on with the job. In every instance but one, the peo­ple whose plight prompt­ed that were not “like us”.

                          PROVING THE RULE

The excep­tion was the siege of Sara­je­vo. As jour­nal­ists are now doing in Ukraine, I and many oth­ers point­ed out that it was a vicious assault on civil­ians in the mid­dle of Europe. The besieg­ing Serbs accused us of being biased and onside with the peo­ple of Sara­je­vo. They con­sid­ered it a form of racism. Per­haps in that they were not far wrong, although I think it was more a case of iden­ti­fy­ing with the victims.
One of the things that drove the sto­ry to the top of the news agen­da night after night was that the peo­ple of Sara­je­vo were “just like us”. That’s why the world gave a damn.
I do not for a moment think that is right. But would view­ers and read­ers have paid as much atten­tion if it had been in a Third World coun­try most of them couldn’t pin­point on a map? No. How­ev­er, seri­ous jour­nal­ists would still go to cov­er it. How much time, col­umn inch­es and resources were allot­ted to the sto­ry would be up to man­age­ment. And frankly, these days, that comes down more to rat­ings and adver­tis­ing rev­enue than jour­nal­is­tic val­ues. Which puts media moguls on a par with West­ern governments.
When was the last time, if ever, diplo­mats walked out of a UN forum to protest aggres­sion against a Third World peo­ple, like they did to shame Russ­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Sergei Lavrov?
One arti­cle sin­gling out jour­nal­ists added: “The insults went beyond media cov­er­age. A French politi­cian said Ukrain­ian refugees rep­re­sent high-qual­i­ty immi­gra­tion.” The Bul­gar­i­an prime min­is­ter said Ukrain­ian refugees are intel­li­gent, they are educated…not the refugee wave we have been used to, peo­ple we were not sure about their iden­ti­ty, peo­ple with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”
Now that is racist.
How­ev­er, to yoke jour­nal­ists risk­ing life and limb to tell the sto­ry of what’s hap­pen­ing in Ukraine with politi­cians ensconced in warm, safe cap­i­tals (as are most pun­dits) is disin­gen­u­ous to the point of disgusting.

                            AND BY THE WAY… 

The most racist ele­ment in the Ukraine sto­ry is coun­tries like Poland, Hun­gry and Aus­tria –whose pol­i­cy on migrants and refugees from non-Euro­pean coun­tries is cal­lous rejec­tion — claim­ing the high ground for doing the right thing by wel­com­ing peo­ple flee­ing Ukraine.
It’s also worth not­ing that in response to social media posts com­plain­ing that Ukrain­ian bor­der guards were hin­der­ing Africans from leav­ing the coun­try, an African Union state­ment not­ed: “Reports that Africans are sin­gled out for unac­cept­able dis­sim­i­lar treat­ment would be shock­ing­ly racist” and vio­late inter­na­tion­al law.
Before apply­ing pejo­ra­tive labels for what you con­sid­er less then well-cho­sen words, I sug­gest a quick Google search to check the reporter’s record. After all, the only risk in doing that is eyestrain.
Bet­ter still, as a jour­nal­ist in Ukraine try­ing to tell the sto­ry suc­cinct­ly put it: “Come join us in the kill zone before cast­ing aspersions.”

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