Conflict and Crises: The Feud for Global Attention

Kate Jarvis, The University of California – Santa Barbara

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Abstract

This article addresses the question of selective media coverage of global conflict and crises. Conflict and crisis are ingrained in the international system, dictating balance of power shifts and the growth and decline of global powers. Global media coverage of these events is not equal. Global media operate through economies of attention and selective presentation of global crises that favor audience interests. Media effects theory outlines media framing, agenda-setting, and content selection practices, which impact perceived event importance for respective audiences. Through comparative case analysis of conflict and crisis coverage in Ukraine, Gaza, and Yemen, three conclusions emerge: 1) media operate to maximize profits by specializing in content that is most appealing to their audiences; 2) Western coverage minimizes regional non-Western conflicts and trivializes their significance in comparison to Western-implicated threats; and 3) humanitarian crisis reporting fundamentally differs from wartime coverage, drawing less public interest and falling prey to Western-centric media exclusion. The media captivates global attention and manipulates public understanding of the most pressing threats to global security. 

1. Introduction

Your attention is for sale. And the global media seeks to be the highest bidder. We can conceive of the media as the diverse mass communication services that disseminate information via broadcasting, publishing, and the Internet. From CNN to Al Jazeera, these individual producers compose the concept of “the media,” but do not act as a unilateral servant of public interest. Instead, each entity reacts to its patrons’ needs, including private corporations, interest groups, and governments. The media operates to fascinate and obtain the attention of the masses: global consumers of knowledge and information. The masses always crave more. One story is soon replaced by another, in the service of producing the next headline, the next hottest commodity. The media, of course, possesses the potential for decency and provides the means to disseminate information quickly on a global scale and improve political awareness of issues around the globe. However, for its merits, it also holds danger. Media is selective. It dictates which issues are the ones to pay attention to, which conflicts are the biggest threats to the world order, and names the villains and the heroes. This grip grows more perilous amidst the digital era: the echo chambers of our algorithms, where AI and deep-fakes blur the lines of reality, and a hyper-capitalist global order monetizes our human attention.  

As we turn our attention to global conflict and crises, this process becomes antithetical to the ideal of a benevolent, informational media. International conflict and crisis are often long-lasting, evolving, and simultaneous. When the media constantly steals and redirects our attention —from Covid, to Ukraine, to Gaza—one conflict after the next minimizes the impact and continued discussion of these important global issues, negating their salience in the public mind. Global crises are best defined by Cottle as “crises whose origins and outcomes cannot for the most part be confined inside the borders of particular nation states; rather, they are endemic to, enmeshed within, and potentially encompassing of today’s late-modern, capitalistic, world.” Crises situations, by default, challenge the media to report them accurately and timely given the evolving scope of conflict. While the media disseminates high levels of uncertainty, confusion, and even fear, audiences seek information quickly; thus, it becomes the responsibility of the media to be purveyors of that information in an ethical and trustworthy manner. 

In fact, most media can only focus on one or two crises at a time for about a three-month span. Thus, in a world where 30 to 40 conflicts generally occur simultaneously, the equation of crisis selection grows complicated. When pockets burn and a thirst for knowledge from parched consumers cannot be quenched, the media lands itself in a predicament: news producers must present the most interesting story, no matter its importance in the realm of the global order, and achieve the financial target. Global media operate through economies of attention and selective presentation and framing of global crises that favor audience interests. Western narratives amplify security threats to the international order and negate the complexities of humanitarian crises, while non-Western media prioritize regional geopolitical concerns and impacts for localized audiences. Overall, the media seeks to maximize consumption and proliferate public understanding of what the most pressing threats to global security are.

When we do not endeavor to understand how and why the media chooses to present information to us, especially about global conflict, we risk remaining ignorant and falling for the traps of attention. Consumers are attracted to the ‘biggest’ conflict: the topic that the media fixates on at the expense of coexisting with others. Topics feud with each other for relevancy and credence. Thus, to be better global citizens and advocates for those who are in danger around the world, we must understand the way mass media manipulates our attention and focuses our cognitive lenses on geopolitically-interesting and profit-maximizing topics. This essay seeks to examine media coverage of global conflict and crises through media effects theory and comparative case studies. The influence of Western bias in wartime and humanitarian crisis coverage will be examined across news sources in the cases of Ukraine, Gaza, and Yemen.

2. Background

Foundationally, it is imperative to explore mass media effects: the tools the media employs to shape audience understandings and perceptions. When we discuss media effects in the context of global crises, we must examine the content selection for mass media before we can dissect the rhetorical elements that further augment the author’s desired takeaway. Hence, agenda-setting refers to the media’s capacity to bring attention to particular issues and problems at the expense of negating, or leaving out, others. Cohen noted the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about”. Thus, McCombs and Shaw posit that mass media determine what issues are important enough for public discourse. Following a survey of voter judgements of issue significance in the 1968 US Presidential election, McCombs and Shaw found a strong positive correlation (0.967) between media emphasis of major campaign issues and voters’ independent judgments of what the most important issues were. Such findings indicate that the interests of the media and candidates manipulate the public opinion on domestic politics. The American public relies on the media to provide factual information and a baseline of issues to focus on. This essay will endeavor to apply agenda-setting theory, originally formulated for domestic interests, to global media. 

Furthermore, media do not only dictate what issues will be discussed, but also play a crucial role organizing the presentation of these issues through framing. With framing, media attention focuses on specific parts of an issue and constructs them within a field of meaning determined by the author. Authors build frames utilizing rhetorical skills—emphasis, elaboration, exclusion, and diction—to influence how audiences think and interpret the information presented to them. Common frames of global media coverage include conflict, human interest, morality, displacement, and responsibility. The technique of priming functions in tandem. However, instead of manipulating the issue’s presentation, an author manipulates the external information that impacts how individuals perceive the information, attempting to make subconscious associations more or less accessible. Priming includes repetition, whereby media may repeat common themes or issues; consumers’ repetitive interaction enhances their subliminal understanding of the issues’ importance or relevance. As issues become more salient and are associated with related topics or affiliations through issue linkage, priming may extend beyond the initial exposure. Ultimately, the precise effects of agenda-setting, framing, and priming, are variable depending on the consumer. Weaver, McCombs, and Spellman conclude that individuals who are most highly interested and uncertain about which party or candidate to support are most susceptible to media manipulation. This complicates the examination of media theory for global news, whereby some individuals may be less concerned with non-domestic events or experience a lack of vested issue interest. Not all individuals seek to be global citizens, nor desire to be informed on global news. Thus, we must turn our focus to economies of attention. 

Specifically, global media coverage of foreign policy does not “readily fit the theoretical mold” of domestic media scholarship. Historically focused on concepts of “problem perception, issue definition, mobilization of interests, subsystem formation, venue shopping, and institutional attention,” functional and structural differences between global media and domestic media stretch the model thin. Domestic issues produce targeted consequences, garner a narrower public interest, and facilitate advocacy due to the symbiotic relationship of democratic policymakers and constituents. Crises in foreign policy “burst onto the scene,” in contrast to domestic issues that arise gradually and linearly. Elections are regularly scheduled. Wars are not. Additionally, because foreign crises generally do not invoke material or solidary benefits, interest group participation is more limited and issues are often not elevated to as high of a level on the public agenda as domestic ones. Thus, the global issues that do receive public attention and credence are entrenched in competition for the scarce resource of consumer interest. Wood and Peake claim the invisible hand of these economies is the American president, who makes “conscious efforts to give higher priority to some issues than others”: agenda-setting. In this interpretation, the media itself lacks agency, and its choices for coverage are bracketed by presidential desires to maintain public support and act in consistency with their predecessors. Study of the Soviet, Arab-Israeli, and Bosnian issues revealed: 1) past media attention causes current media attention to focus on the same issues; and 2) past presidential attention correlates to current presidential attention. Both provide evidence of issue inertia at work in the realm of foreign policy news. Moreover, when juxtaposed with each other as competing conflicts in three arrangements, negative correlations emerge, indicating that an increase in coverage of a new issue occurs alongside diminishing coverage of a former one. Space on the public agenda is finite and the media seeks to maximize profits by providing what consumers seek to digest (although exceptions must be made for long-term prevailing events like Arab-Israeli issues). Foreign policy issues are continuous and evolving, and in accordance, so are economies of public attention.

While economies of attention operate among public interest in foreign policy, the power of the president to set the agenda is a very American-centric view. In a less cynical view of the power of the press, media crises selection and sourcing must also be taken into account. Existing research is inconclusive pertaining to authors’ selection of sources during crises. Yet, we know that information (outside of direct reporter experience) comprises news coverage, which in turn influences public messaging and comprehension of the crises, dependent on the underlying source material. Van der Meer et al. propose “gatekeeping theory,” or the methods the media undertake to filter the information presented to the public. Researchers conducted a source assessment survey with journalist participants and utilized a structural equation model to predict source selection (among 214 Dutch journalists) by characteristics of credibility, knowledge, willingness, timeliness, and the relationship with the journalist. Findings indicated gatekeeping theory holds during coverage of crises, but that source inclination may be variable depending on fluctuations and disruptions in the conflict. Journalists prioritize quality assessment over source availability, but during crises, journalists tend to rely on more familiar sources, like news agencies, and disregard less familiar ones, like the organization experiencing the crisis and the public, which may result in framing, bias, and imbalanced coverage. Journalistic institutions are premier and information from new agencies predominantly comprise crisis coverage, particularly where the journalist maintains a positive judgement of the source and the source is readily available, both of which increase the likelihood of the source’s inclusion in media. Here, we observe media production as it acts to achieve self-serving interests, or to meet publishing and financial constraints. Ultimately, global media platforms—BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera—create and disseminate global coverage publications and broadcasts for their own interests, not the public.

3. A Comparative Analysis

This essay examines how global media operate through economies of attention and biased crisis topic selection, studied through comparative analysis of three crisis cases: Ukraine, Gaza, and Yemen. Global coverage of wartime and violence is not equivalent to that of humanitarian crises, and we must explore why the media renders these crises unequally salient. Within a singular crisis, geopolitical biases promote reporting discrepancies in written and broadcast publications, attending to needs and interests of media stakeholders and the public. These cases are selected to reflect discrepancies in the West and non-West as well as between wartime violence and humanitarian emergencies. The Russia-Ukraine War is more heavily tied to Western interests, whereas Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza more heavily relates to the East, although the connections of the US and Israel must be noted. Both analyses focus on wartime violence, but inclusion or exclusion of humanitarian impacts are also discussed. Yemen serves as an indicator for humanitarian regional crises for the non-West, which are largely ignored by mainstream Western media. Media coverage is examined through framing, agenda-setting, and content effects, and evaluated through public takeaways on the comparative importance of each crisis.

A. The Ukraine Case

Discrepancies between media outlets expose the coverage differences of Western and non-Western bias. The Russia-Ukraine War is a more Western conflict, but global media sources do not always posit the same Western-idolizing narratives. News reports collected from BBC and Al Jazeera on the Russia-Ukraine War between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2023 demonstrated differences in conflict content and framing, emotional tone, and geopolitical themes. In terms of coverage, both outlets focused heavily on humanitarian issues and refugee influx in the first quarter of 2022; however, each outlet varied in their content and scope. Al  Jazeera, known as the first independent news channel in the Arab world, founded with the tagline, “The Opinion and the Other Opinion,” focused more heavily on the main refugee-receiving states, such as Germany and Poland. Emphasis of refugee displacement amidst wartime tends to the interests of its primary Middle Eastern audience: immediate humanitarian impacts, which are particularly salient among Middle Eastern shared experiences of displacement and migration. On the other hand, BBC, which posits itself as “the world’s leading public service broadcaster” committed to impartiality and independence, provided broader coverage. BBC seeks to inform a global audience, highlighting comprehensive wartime outcomes for countries including Spain, Slovakia, and Italy, reflecting European and Western concern. Outlet disparities stress how media serves to meet the interests of its consumers, rather than necessarily provide a holistic view of global and regional implications. For non-Western consumers, perhaps the active consumers of Al Jazeera’s publications, BBC would fail to provide them with a deeper understanding of how they may be regionally affected by the Ukrainian refugee crisis, as BBC operates with a Western audience in mind. Though BBC’s Western-centric approach provides helpful information, it fails to adeptly address non-Western implications and humanitarian needs. Moreover, in terms of emotional framing, both Al Jazeera and BBC presented negative portrayals of the war; yet, Al Jazeera implied higher fear (25.5%) than BBC (20.4%) and also less joy (7.11%) than BBC (11.4%). This data is of bifocal importance. If we assume the media to be an impartial reporter, BBC’s wider emotional spectrum and less negative attributions suggests it may be more reputable and rich in varying perspectives of the conflict. However, for its neutral merits, we could also understand this narrative as apathetic, tone-deaf to the pressing humanitarian crises afflicting the non-West and those who are not predominant consumers of BBC. Although fear and anger indicate media bias, these emotional evocations employed by Al Jazeera may also be necessary to convey the emotional gravity of the humanitarian crises at hand. If a lack of bias requires a lack of emotion, then does the media truly seek to inform and inspire audiences to advocate for change amidst conflict? Crisis in itself is a complex and emotional experience for those who cause, witness, and experience harm, and even more so for those who advocate for change. To be apathetic is to be complicit, yet surplus emotion is to be sensationalist. Conceiving of this paradox is difficult when the goals of the media itself are so contested. If the media’s goal is to serve as an unbiased reporter and purveyor of information, perhaps BBC is correct in their pursuit of broader geopolitical discussion and direct ‘accuracy.’ Yet, if serving consumer interests and captivating attention are premier, the media might choose the most gripping, emotionally-contentious events to highlight and incite discourse, the move of Al Jazeera. Ultimately, Al Jazeera’s emphasis on humanitarian urgency in contrast to BBC’s prioritization of systemic impacts illustrate how global media utilize framing to shape regional and global orientations toward crises. 

B. The Gaza Case

Furthermore, regional framing discrepancies abound in coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza. Western media bias tends to support Israel and deny responsibility in their ensuing genocide: with their framing, Israel attacks Gaza in pursuit of self-defense against terrorism. To undermine Israeli culpability, the media dehumanizes Palestinian lives. Palestinians “die,” they are not “killed,” yet when Israelis die, the media refers to their deaths as a “massacre” or “slaughter”. Through this narrative, the media legitimizes Israeli actions and presents Palestinian suffering as collateral damage in the defense of state sovereignty. Cherkaoui refers to these as the “victimhood frame” and “innocence frame”. The former draws parallels between the contemporary Jewish experiences and history of persecution, entrenching the Israeli state as a “perpetual target of global hostility,” while the latter affirms Israel’s actions are of necessary self-preservation, rather than unprovoked aggression, where outcomes for Palestine are justified and inevitable. For example, CNN—which considers itself the “most honored brand in cable news” with a mission to inform, empower, and engage the world—utilized the “innocence frame” in its November 2023 coverage. This frame portrays Israel’s military offensive as a necessary act to protect the state, instating Israel as the victim and Palestine as villain and instigator. Simultaneously, Al Jazeera English (AJE) described Hamas as “fighters” and Israeli soldiers as an “army” to highlight the power imbalance of the parties and affirm the historical narrative of Palestinian defiance. AJE situates these in frames of resistance, where Palestinians must fight for self-determination to preserve their identity and justice as victims of Israeli aggression, and selects specific language to reflect this narrative, such as personal testimonies of abuse from Palestinians. 

Ultimately, the impact of media frames and selective content amidst global crises cannot be ignored. Regional outlets may contain biased information, but when juxtaposed with mainstream Western media, it is clear that this non-Western tilt is important to highlight voices and perspectives otherwise silenced. Comprehensively, Western coverage is characterized by “decontextualization” and “sanitisation” of the conflict, where news groups minimize the significance of deaths from non-West parties. Western media fails to represent the history of long-enduring conflict, treating acts of terror as isolated incidents, rather than situating them in their broader context of ethnic struggle, referred to by Iyengar as media framing as a “context of no context.”. Systemic bias infiltrates reporting and undermines the ethics of journalistic professionalism, which even CNN employees criticized their own company for. Corporate interest, political-military alliances, and ideology manipulate media portrayals that in turn shape public opinion and collective understanding of global conflict. 

C. The Yemen Case

Moreover, media discrepancies in global conflict portrayal grow even more perilous regarding the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen, particularly following the reignition of armed conflict by a Saudi-led state coalition in March 2015. Bachman and Ruiz analyzed New York Times headlines of conflict in Yemen and Ukraine in 2022, focusing on discrepancies in coverage and framing as a result of Western biases. From the baseline, coverage of Ukraine proved exponentially larger than that of Yemen with 1149 headlines on overall civilian impact in a mere nine months, compared to only 546 Yemen-focused headlines in seven years. Furthermore, in terms of explicit focus on civilian harm in front page stories, NYT published four Yemen-focused stories to fourteen Ukrainian ones, and for explicit focus on armament, Yemen numbered six front page stories to Ukraine’s thirteen. 

Within these publishing discrepancies, Western-biased frames influence the perceived importance of the crises competing for global attention. Among civilian headlines, only 36 percent claimed the Saudi-led coalition as the responsible party for civilian harm. Instead, headlines minimize the conflict as an isolated event for Yemen. For example, ‘Yemen Strike Hits Wedding and Kills More Than 20,’ trivializes the conflict in comparison to the escalation of civilian harm in Ukraine. Stories pertaining to Ukraine clearly refer to war crimes and atrocities and inflict blame upon Russia in 88 percent of headlines, referring to Russia’s deliberate attacks and even “genocide” with the “intent to destroy Ukrainians as a distinct group”. Additionally, among armament headlines, NYT coverage provides more extensive, direct, and normative analysis on Ukraine, whereas coverage of Yemen omits responsibility and fails to call for Western action, boasting descriptive neutral analysis. For Yemen, episodic frames focus on US provision of military aid to Saudi Arabia and inconclusive risks that these American-funded weapons may exacerbate Yemen’s civilian conflict, like ‘US Blocks Arms Sale to Saudi Arabia Amid Concerns Over Yemen War.’ Headlines fail to relay both Saudi and US culpability in worsening the humanitarian crisis and minimize real casualties with estimated “concerns.” In contrast, Ukrainian coverage is more thematic and focuses on broader implications of military aid, risks of US-Russia escalation, and global implications for balance of power politics. Headlines clearly denounce Russia as the responsible aggressor and threat to geopolitical stability, like ‘US Speaks of ‘Catastrophic Consequences’ if Russia resorts to Nuclear Weapons,’ whereas the US is a “just supporter of Ukrainian resistance.” Overall, NYT discusses the Yemen crisis with a sense of apathy and American helplessness, treating the conflict and civilian casualties as an isolated, far-away incident, whereas Ukrainian conflict poses threats to the Western international order and thus commands need for greater global attention and intervention.

4. Commanding Public Attention

Consideration of these cases yields three significant conclusions for media selection of crises. The first: media operate to maximize profits by specializing in content that is most appealing to their audiences. These may be geopolitical concerns, for example, Al Jazeera’s Arab audience versus BBC’s British audience, or the scope of discussion, regional implications versus global impact. Publications seek to maximize viewership and engagement, so they strive to prioritize public interest in their focus. The second: Western coverage minimizes regional non-Western conflicts and trivializes their significance in comparison to Western-implicated threats. Bachman and Ruiz best identify these biases as peripheralism and culturalism. Peripheralism asserts that certain states (the global superpowers) are ‘core nations’ and the rest are ‘peripheral,’ in which the core will receive greater media attention. This condition exacerbates cultural ‘othering,’ or marginalization of non-white populations as a result of persisting imperialism, and is reflective of the apathetic position of American media outlets toward crises in states bearing less Western interest. Culturalism is an extension of othering and refers to the belief “that one cultural group is somehow better or worse than some other cultural group,” which accounts for the discrepancy in reporting civilian casualties for certain ethnic and national groups. The third: humanitarian crisis reporting fundamentally differs from wartime coverage, drawing less public interest and falling prey to Western-centric media exclusion. Media outlets have historically underreported humanitarian crises due to their regional, narrower socio-political implications, dismissed from the agenda of “big news.” Where humanitarian crises may not garner as much public interest due to their more limited scope and lack of adversarial action that armed conflict boasts, media networks, particularly broadcasters, move the “TV cameras” to maximize the profitability of the story they endeavor to tell. Comprehensively, media framing and content effects reinforce cultural biases and reporting dynamics. Public interest simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the geopolitically-aligned coverage.

5. Conclusion

Global media seek to maximize profits, manipulate audiences in creation of economies of attention, and utilize framing and agenda-setting techniques to portray geopolitically and economically-desirable narratives of crisis. The divide between the West and non-West is evident in reporting disparities of a singular crisis by diametrically opposed publications as well as disproportional Western focus on Western-implicated global conflict versus non-Western regional conflict. The media captivates global attention and manipulates public understanding of the most pressing threats to global security. We must remain vigilant in understanding how and why the media manipulates audiences. When we choose to ignore conflicts and information that are not readily salient to us, that does not negate their existence. Thus, to be better global citizens, we must seek out what is hidden by Western media and educate ourselves on the minimized crisis and violence occurring simultaneously with the crises we discuss every day. When we think of intervention in Ukraine, we must also consider intervention in Yemen, to escape the shackles of Western media’s attention traps. Whether we are aware of global and civilian dangers does not determine whether they continue, so we must choose the path of education and challenge the public agenda dictated to us by profit-maximizing, audience-manipulating media.