Good Point

It is indeed true that the coverage of the conflict in the Ukraine has uncovered a lot of racist attitudes in the media.

Basically, you see a lot of the reporters and the talking heads expressing shock about what is going on, because it's wipipo who are being bombed.

Suddenly, when the victims of collateral damage are not brown people, it's important: 

The scenes are gravely familiar to anyone familiar with the 21st century news cycle: families fleeing on foot, swarming border crossings and searching through rubble for loved ones. Journalists reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could not help but compare the military strikes and resulting humanitarian crisis to recent conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

But a painful double standard quickly emerged inside of those comparisons.

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

D’Agata’s troubling language, in which he seemed to catch himself midsegment, pinpointed much of the emerging bias. In the heat of war, as the international press corps scrambled in real time to wrap their arms around a fast-moving military campaign, a number of correspondents, consciously or not, framed suffering and displacement as acceptable for Arabs, Afghans and others over there — but not here, in Europe, where the people “have blue eyes and blond hair” and where they “look like us.” (And yes, those are actual quotations from news clips.) 

………

Political commentator Mehdi Hasan made sure the omission didn’t go unnoticed. “Europe has been home to some of the worst wars and worst war crimes in human history — I mean, the Holocaust,” he said on his MSNBC show Sunday. “So why this surprise that bad things are happening in Europe? And second, when they say, ‘Oh, civilized cities’ and, in another clip, ‘Well-dressed people’ and ‘This is not the Third World,’ they really mean white people, don’t they?”

Writers who’d previously addressed conflicts in the Gulf region, often with a focus on geopolitical strategy and employing moral abstractions, appeared to be empathizing for the first time with the plight of civilians. “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking,” wrote Daniel Hannan in a piece for Britain’s the Telegraph. “Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.”

The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association sent out a statement on Sunday condemning “the racist implications that any population or country is ‘uncivilized’ or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict. This type of commentary reflects 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. It dehumanizes and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected ... civilian casualties and displacement in other countries are equally as abhorrent as they are in Ukraine.”

………

The unguarded bias that emerged from reporters covering Ukraine isn’t new. The selling of America’s operation in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq centered around a narrative of saving the brutes from themselves. Reporters were embedded with American troops as they rolled into Baghdad in 2003 and stuck with them during early coverage of the war. They didn’t witness what Iraqis experienced during the initial stages of “shock and awe” and missed what a modern city the Iraqi capital was before its “liberation.”

I’d like to think this experience would have changed their ideas about the “uncivilized” place or made its people seem more like, well, people. But by the time the fallout from years of war made its way to Europe, in the form of Arab and North African refugees who poured in by the millions, the press had grown tired of covering the war on terror, much less its reverberations. Without a personal connection, that human tragedy was just old news, and the refugees were a “crisis.”

………

Policy on the ground in Europe reflected the double standard of some press outlets. As Ukrainians fled the country, crossing the border into neighboring Poland, Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said, “These are not the refugees we are used to. They are Europeans, intelligent, educated people, some are IT programmers ... this is not the usual refugee wave of people with an unknown past. No European country is afraid of them.”

………

Unfortunately, in Europe’s newest conflict, at least one age-old problem persists: The limits of empathy in wartime are still too often measured by race.

This is what "Freedom Bombs" are.  This is what they do to people.

Whether you hear from Neocons or Liberal Interventionists, the result is the same, people dead, society shattered, but all too often it's just dead people and wrecked countries.