LA Times Reporter Accuses Journalists Covering Ukraine of Bias – Opinion

What would you think if I said that media coverage about the conflict in Ukraine was biased? What if I also told you that a story about Ukraine should point out that what’s happening to that country should focus on circumspect comparability of Ukrainians to other persecuted peoples such as Palestinians, Kurds, Yazidis, Afghans, and everyone else who’s ever been persecuted? Otherwise, the story just isn’t sensitively framed.

What if a writer stated the worst thing you could say about Ukraine on the air or in writing is: “I didn’t think it was possible for this to happen in Europe in 2022”? Or that any journalist who expresses what’s happening to Ukrainians as a unique, world-changing event is guilty of the moral sin of being implicitly racist.?

Well, that’s what LA Times television critic Lorraine Ali reports in her recent article, “In Ukraine reporting, Western press reveals grim bias toward ‘people like us,’” where she laments the words of her fellow journalists who went to Ukraine to cover the war. Ali’s bio on the LA Times site states that she has also covered “culture at-large, entertainment, and American Muslim issues” for her paper.

Ali’s article parrots and buys into the press release of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA), which takes umbrage at the statements of reporters from CNN to Al Jazeera. AMEJA’s virtue-signaling message to newsrooms is that one shouldn’t make the Ukrainians so special because it’s disrespectful to other “victims of war.” The AMEJA statement from February reads,

Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association calls for all news media to pay attention to implicit and explicit biases in covering the war in Ukraine. Only a few days ago, we found examples of racist news media coverage that gave more attention to war victims than other..

Ali is in agreement and concludes her article by:

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 strikes me as selfish and insensitive from a group far too easily triggered journalist who, through their chosen narrative, are the ones showing their biases denigrating the importance of Ukraine’s upheaval to the human condition. It’s the same academic woke bias behavior, just extended into war zones.

Ali and AMEJA are caught up in their narrower views of the world. Instead of telling the story, the pair are trying inject their own views into it. You can almost hear the Karen cackle, “How dare you imply that your world can forget my issues?”  As if just making someone else’s plight important during their 15 minutes means your entire history is forgotten.

Yet, the very foreign correspondents AMEJA claims are racist, the same ones who turned up in Gaza, Sinjar. Aleppo. Kandahar. And other locations that are dear and close to the heart of AMEJA journalists.

They are journalists who stay in Kyiv fully dressed and ready to run to the bunkers at 2:20am. These people have field experience and can tell when something is different. And know it’s their job to say so to the world.

It’s bad journalism on the part of AMEJA and Ali to editorialize their personal biases into the Ukraine story this way.

Ukraine is an untold story. Ukraine is the story about the collapse of the post-Cold War “peace dividend.” It’s the realization that the fear that the world thought it had eliminated — that the human race may perish in a nuclear wasteland — has very much returned. It’s a story about realizing that countries that have integrated deeply into the first world economy can be as fragile as eggshells. It’s witnessing the truth that cityscapes in Europe in 2022 can be reduced to what they looked like in 1945 overnight. It’s the story of witnessing the attempt to raise a defunct Cold War superpower to begin a mission of conquest — challenging the world order of Western democracies. This is the story of how the West fails to prevent it. It’s the story of the last superpower of the Cold War, the United States of America, foundering aimlessly after decades of internal decay. This is the story of how hollow and depraved our human condition has become.

It is not a conscious decision to make the plights of black and brown refugees more pressing than those of their white counterparts, Ms. Ali said. Ali and others who are like her should look within themselves to see how their emotions are conflicted, rather than reacting to the tragedy witnesses with anger. While witnessing another society fall from peace into war, they are the ones who display a lack empathy.

Every tragedy is a reminder of the pain that cultures have experienced. There’s an emotional response to such things. Moments like this can be interpreted with compassion for the suffering or with envy.

Ali, and others who are like her, should instead be focused on the implications of Western Europe’s destruction for the future of dispersed diasporas of their people. They sought refuge in the West for their persecuted neighbors. Many continue to look to the west with hope — a hope that is now dimming.

All refugees fleeing despots within their home countries will soon be less secure in the future. It is possible that the ideallism and individual liberty of the West may have begun to fade. Ukraine marks the start of the return of the first world to the dark ages. Ukraine is also a curtain call for Ali’s hopes and dreams, too.

“It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.” – Mahatma Gandhi.