Inside ‘double standards’ in Western coverage of Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sunday, 27 February 2022 20:07

As the Russian operation in Ukraine continues into the fourth day, the “double standards” of the Western media in covering the Russia-Ukraine conflict have attracted criticism worldwide.

Iran Press/ Europe: The Russian special operation in Ukraine began on Thursday after President Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to enter Ukraine, following months of a heavy military build-up on the border.

Ukraine’s health minister said at least 198 Ukrainians, including three children, have been killed so far during the conflict. The United Nations says more than 360,000 Ukrainians have fled the country, with the majority crossing the border into neighboring Poland, Al Jazeera reported.

The war has triggered swift condemnation by several countries, immediate sanctions by the United States and other countries targeting Russian banks, oil refineries, and military exports, and marathon emergency talks at the UN Security Council (UNSC).

On social media, the speed of such an international response – which includes the exclusion of Russia from some cultural events and treatment of it as a pariah in sports – has raised eyebrows at the lack of such a reaction to other conflicts across the world.

Media outlets’ double standards

Media pundits, journalists, and political figures have been accused of double standards for using their outlets to not only commend Ukraine’s armed resistance to Russian troops, but also to underlying their horror at how such a conflict could happen to a “civilised” nation.

CBS News senior correspondent in Kyiv Charlie D’Agata said on Friday: “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilised, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”

His comments were met with derision and anger on social media, with many pointing out how his statements contributed to the further dehumanization of non-white, non-European people suffering under a conflict within mainstream media.

D’Agata later apologized, saying he spoke “in a way I regret.”

A matter of color

On Saturday, the BBC hosted Ukraine’s former deputy general prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze.

“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair and blue eyes being killed every day with Putin’s missiles and his helicopters and his rockets,” Sakvarelidze said.

The BBC presenter responded: “I understand and of course respect the emotion.”

Also on Friday, Sky News broadcast a video of people in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro making Molotov cocktails, explaining how grating Styrofoam makes the incendiary device stick to vehicles better.

“Amazing mainstream Western media gives glowing coverage of people resisting invasion by making molotov cocktails,” one social media user remarked. “If they were brown people in Yemen or Palestine doing the same they would be labeled terrorists deserving US-Israeli or US-Saudi drone bombing.”

On BFM TV, France’s most-watched cable news channel, journalist Philippe Corbe said: “We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin, we’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.”

British journalist Daniel Hannan was criticized online for an article in The Telegraph, in which he wrote that war no longer happens in “impoverished and remote populations.”

European politicians have also expressed support for open borders towards Ukrainian refugees, using terminology such as “intellectuals” and “European” – a far cry from the fear-mongering used by governments against migrants and refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

“Skin is a passport … epidermal citizenship,” one social media user said.

Jean-Louis Bourlanges, a member of the French National Assembly, told a TV channel that the Ukrainian refugees will be “an immigration of great quality, intellectuals, one that we will be able to take advantage of.”

The Russia-Ukraine war has been billed by liberal media as Europe’s worst security crisis since the end of World War II, contributing to the general amnesia of relatively recent conflicts on the continent such as the Bosnian war in the 1990s and the Northern Ireland conflict that lasted from the 1960s until 1998.

Absent from such generalizations was the fact that in the post-World War era, Europe exported many wars in countries that were previous colonial entities.

Some commentators have also heaped praise on the steadfastness of Ukrainians and the country’s defense capabilities in a way that they suggested no other nation or people have undergone such an experience before.