18 Nov 2024 Victims as heroes or villains: Double standards in covering two contemporary conflicts

Daya Thussu

As the world marks the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel and its bloody aftermath, it is worth reflecting on the way this ongoing conflict has been covered by the US-dominated international media and compare it with media attitudes towards another contemporary conflict which has preoccupied international news headlines since February 2022 – the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Although news media are often accused of bias in the reporting of wars, the communication of conflict is also shaped by larger, geopolitical forces, through political institutions, think tanks, the military-industrial complex and transnational media corporations. Despite occasional challenges by the media to the predominant Western framing of wars, there is little doubt that the majority of the US-led Western media have tended to operate within the boundaries of a well-worn narrative (Thussu, 2025).

While the media in Western democracies operate free from direct government control and profess high professional standards of accuracy and accountability, they nevertheless act as instruments to legitimize the interests of their governments, especially in times of war and conflict. Western media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war focuses more on Israel’s self-defence and security in the context of Hamas terrorism, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a strong anti-Islamist angle.

The leading media outlets of the US frame the Russia-Ukraine conflict in terms of democracy versus authoritarianism, where Ukraine is depicted as defending its sovereignty against Putin’s aggression. Russia, being an old adversary of the US, is presented as the unethical aggressor, committing war crimes, violating human rights, creating a global refugee crisis and trying to destabilize European security and global geopolitics.

Covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine – victims as “heroes”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has received almost blanket coverage in the mainstream Western media, as the most serious threat to the liberal international system based on the inviolability of national sovereignty. The conflict has witnessed the most stringent sanctions imposed by the collective West on any country and can be seen as a form of economic “warfare” (Mulder, 2022: 3). For example, the US and the European Union (EU) moved to block major Russian banks from using SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) the financial-communications system that facilitates the transfer of money around the world, a move which was described by the French finance minister as a “financial nuclear weapon” (quoted in Leali, 2022).

However, despite dire predictions in the mainstream media by Western experts – officials, think tanks and academics – that the Russian economy would collapse in three months after Moscow’s misadventure, it not only survived but experienced modest growth, while Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, is in recession. Most Western commentators did not take fully into account that the sanctions regime would be undermined by the new and not so new geopolitical and economic ties being forged outside the Euro-Atlantic zone, between Russia and other large economies, notably China and India.

The communications aspect of the event followed the usual Western narrative in media coverage: the invasion was led by an “irrational” and “unwell” leader of an authoritarian state, who threatened use of weapons of mass destruction and was capable to declare a “nuclear war” (Zajec, 2022). This was used to justify the enormous military aid given to Ukraine, the US spending more than $100 billion, while the EU pledged $96 billion – a windfall for defence companies – supplying sophisticated weaponry.

The German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s statement at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in January 2023, that the European nations were “fighting a war against Russia” put to rest any pretence that this was not a proxy war explicitly supported by NATO. In dominant media discourses the West’s role in contributing to the conflict in Ukraine continues to be ignored: for example, its not very subtle support for toppling President Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014 sparked a crisis in eastern Ukraine and thwarted the Minsk-2 agreement a year later, which might have offered a compromise and averted the Russian invasion of 2022.

While Western media coverage highlighted the illegality and brutality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the suffering of the Ukrainian people, in the global South the interest in this distant war was limited as it was seen, accurately, as a European affair. At the UN, many members of the global South did not isolate Russia diplomatically despite intense pressure from the US and its European allies. India (the biggest importer of Russian arms, and since the invasion, of its crude oil) and the United Arab Emirates abstained from crucial votes and, on 2nd March 2022, 35 countries abstained or voted against the Western-sponsored resolution to condemn the Russian invasion. Such sentiments were in evidence in other forums too. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky received standing ovations wherever he spoke – in Western parliaments, film festivals, security conferences –- when he addressed the African Union in June 2022, only four out of 55 invited heads of state attended the virtual session (BBC, 2022).

Double standards show in the way the conflict was framed in the media: unlike post-Cold War US military interventions – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and various other attempts and versions of “regime change” –- the Russian invasion was presented as an unprovoked act of aggression, routinely labelled as “Putin’s war” recalling the ideological and geopolitical rivalry of the Cold War, as a clash between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, between European integration and Russian imperialism (Diesen, 2022).

For their part, the dominant framing in the Kremlin-controlled Russian media was that the war was an existential one to protect Russian geoeconomic interests and a pre-emptive “special military operation” in defence of NATO’s expansion to the borders of Russia. Protecting the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine shaped the official narrative emanating from Moscow both on and off-line in a powerful propaganda blitz deploying among others such networks as RT (formerly Russia Today) and the news agency Sputnik.

Russian cyberspace continues to be full of anti-Ukrainian diatribe and symbols, most notably “Z”, the Kremlin’s ubiquitous insignia of its “special military operation” (Garner, 2023). In addition, as the invasion took place, Russian journalists were forced to comply with military censorship – which included banning use of the terms like “war” or “invasion” forcing the closure of independent (read Western-oriented) media outlets such as Novaya Gazeta and Echo Moscow (Gessen, 2022).

The Ukraine invasion also starkly demonstrated Western double standards in representing the victims of war and conflict. Coverage in the mainstream Western media was full of reports about European, white-skinned, blue-eyed refugees, who were being allowed immediately into the EU, with Poland and Germany each receiving more than one million Ukrainians in 2022. Germany had a policy of allowing Ukrainian refugees to stay without needing to go through the elaborate and highly bureaucratic asylum request processing; they were paid higher allowances and given an immediate work permit.

In contrast brown and black refugees received very different treatment. At the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the largest number of foreign students studying in that country was from India and they had extreme difficulties trying to leave Ukraine, until the Indian air force evacuated them; African students had even worse experiences (Thussu, 2025).

The dominant media narrative reflected Ukraine’s formidable support, advice and resources of Western, or more specifically, Anglo-American public relations and media managers. Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post reported, had a strong strategic communications unit, with advice “from the UK and the US” (Taylor, 2022). Zelensky’s persona is a great example of how the media and public relations experts can construct the image of a leader, one who demonstrates “tremendous courage” by remaining in Kyiv during the initial attack in February 2022, projecting an air of defiance to promote cohesion at home and support internationally.

Two days into the invasion, the AP reported that Zelensky had rejected a US offer to evacuate him from Kyiv, saying, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” A senior US official told the New Yorker, “To the best of my knowledge, that never happened. But hats off to Zelensky and the people around him. It was a great line” (quoted in Yaffa, 2022). The invasion and its mediatization made Zelensky a global icon being named by Time magazine as “2022 person of the year”, a decision “the most clear-cut in memory”, wrote the magazine’s editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal (Time, 2022).

Hollywood icon Sean Penn, who made a documentary about the Ukraine war, handed his Oscar award to Zelensky as a symbol of faith in Ukraine’s victory, while Zelensky’s address at the 2022 Cannes film festival received a standing ovation. The president’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel helped organize channels of communication with celebrities and wrote a glowing account of the President (Mendel, 2022), which received overwhelmingly positive coverage in Western media. She explained that “as a former actor, Zelenskiy appreciates the power of actors, especially from Hollywood” (cited in Koshiw, 2023).

While this eulogizing was in full swing, there was hardly any coverage in the Western media of the bloodiest war of 2022 between the Ethiopian government and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, in which more than half a million people lost their lives between 2020 and 2022 (Schaap, 2023). The director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus – who is from Tigray – labelled it as the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world” which had been totally ignored in the media, and commented that “maybe the reason is the colour of the skin of the people” (quoted in Reuters, 2022).

In a digitally connected world, saturated by visual geopolitics such “global racial imaginary” (Barder, 2021) often defines what or who is newsworthy. The unfortunate truth is that the most mortal war in contemporary times is the least reported – more than three million have died since the mid-1990s in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo – sometimes referred to as “Africa’s world war”.

The Gaza catastrophe – victims as “villains”

While the victims of Russian invasion were lionized and helped materially and militarily by Western governments and received a very sympathetic response from the mainstream media, the victims of the Israeli invasion of Gaza are, more often than not, presented as partly culpable in their support for Hamas, denounced as Islamist “terrorists”, sworn to the idea of the destruction of the Jewish state. Although the US and its European allies have made half-hearted calls for de-escalation, they have continued to provide Israel with political support and a regular supply of high-end weaponry to sustain its war. A report from the Brown University’s Watson Institute said that the US has spent $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since the war in Gaza started a year ago, the highest annual total. Israel, the US’s strongest ally in the Middle East, is the biggest recipient of US military aid in history, taking in $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959, according to the report (Bilmes, Hartung and Semler, 2024).

The Israeli invasion of Gaza was in response to the brutal attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas on southern Israel during which at least 1,139 Israelis were killed. For more than a year now, almost impervious to international public opinion, Israel has been escalating its devastating offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory, killing so far nearly 42,000 people and wounding almost 100,000 (the majority being women and children). The civilian infrastructure and basic amenities of the narrow strip have been demolished by the constant bombardment, leading to 1.9 million Gazans displaced out of the estimated 2.2 million population (Al Jazeera, 2024). A large number of Palestinians are missing, buried under the debris.

At the outset, Gaza’s communication system was destroyed, “hindering Hamas’s command and control by targeting cell-phone towers in airstrikes and denying electricity to Palestinian Internet service providers” (Singer and Brooking, 2023: 8). This was done partly to ensure that the news and information from the besieged Gaza would not reach the outside world. The killing of dozens of local journalists covering the invasion – some Israel alleged were working for Hamas or at the very least sympathetic to the militant organization – further restricted the flow of news and information (Loveluck, Harb and Dehghanpoor, 2024).

Most Western media organizations have largely followed the Israeli version of this continuing atrocity, which openly flouts international and humanitarian law, and which many have denounced as genocide. Operating under the military censor of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), even leading global news networks such as CNN have tamely followed the IDF line on the progress of the war in Gaza. As the invasion began, CNN’s News Standards and Practices division emailed to staff outlining how they should write about the war, instructing them that they should “describe the Ministry of Health as ‘Hamas-controlled’ whenever we are referring to casualty statistics or other claims related to the present conflict”. It also emphasised the need to “cover the broader current geopolitical and historical context of the story” while continuing to “remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of Israeli civilians” (cited in Boguslaw, 2024).

Such coverage has provided a clear rationale for selective media attention. A CNN staffer was quoted in The Guardian: “the majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel.” A memo from Mark Thompson, the boss of CNN (and formerly of the BBC and the New York Times) said that while CNN would report the human consequences of the Israeli assault and the historical context of the story, “we must continue always to remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of civilians” (Italics in the original) (cited in McGreal, 2024).

One result of such deference to Israeli censorship and restrictions on international journalists is that Israel’s bombardment of aid convoys, refugee shelters, hospitals and even UN workers has been largely under reported, thus not generating the opposition which such actions deserve, despite strong public opinion in major Western cities as witnessed by regular and large anti-war protests. Addressing the annual UN General Assembly on September 23, 2024, the heads of the leading principal UN aid agencies summarized the situation in Gaza: “More than two million Palestinians are without protection, food, water, sanitation, shelter, health care, education, electricity, and fuel – the basic necessities to survive.”

Half-truths and even downright lies are part of Israel’s public relations arsenal, most notably the claim that “40 decapitated babies” were allegedly found in the Kfar Aza kibbutz, one of the communities most impacted by the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October 2023, which proved to be a rumour, as an investigation by Le Monde demonstrated (Maad, Audureau and Forey, 2024).

The two conflicts discussed above clearly indicate the double standards shown by US-dominated Western news organizations in covering conflict situations where vital geopolitical and economic interests are involved and how professional standards of journalism are subservient to relaying an acceptable narrative.

References

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Daya Thussu is Professor of International Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies, University of London. His latest book is Changing Geopolitics of Global Communication (Routledge, 2025).