Stark biases against non-white refugees have surfaced amid the flood of news coverage on the war in Ukraine.
: “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."“One thing that we're seeing is an undeniable desensitization of journalists towards imagery around the Middle East and that kind of suffering,” Mahdis Keshavarz, board member with AMEJA, tells Axios.
The fact that many of these statements were made live on-air, in the heat of a moment or felt viscerally on the ground during a live report, reflects how “subconsciously embedded” the framework is of the Middle East as a geography of violence or Africa as a geography of disease, Maytha Alhassen, fellow of religion and public life in media and entertainment at Harvard, tells Axios.
Ultimately, the views can also “perpetuate prejudicial responses to political and humanitarian crises,” AMEJA adds.“The implicit bias that many are holding and using is continuing to do damage,” says