Did you notice that the media just stopped talking about The War in Ukraine? It feels like it was just a trend that everyone was chatting about and then that “trend” got out of style and they just stopped caring. The problem here is obvious: you can’t treat a war the same way you do a trend, it doesn’t even make sense to do it.
We’re talking about people and lives that are being ignored by the media. A little context: the Ukrainian War started on February 24, 2022, so now it has been two years. There are no confirmed statistics but it is estimated that there will be 500 thousand losses on both sides and, according to the OIM, more than 14 million people have been forced to move since the beginning of the war. There is no expectation of an end. Click here to know what happened till now in the war.
Now you might be asking yourself why the media seems to get enough of the war. Well, there are three main reasons to enumerate: 1) The way journalism works, 2) The “saturation” of the subject in the media, and 3) The beginning of the Palestine-Israel War.
The way Journalism works
Not everyone knows how the media selects the news they will show the public. It has some criteria that we call “news value”, it can be proximity, wars, celebrities, natural disasters, economy, politics, deaths, etc. For example, if I get sick it’s not news because I’m not famous and it’s irrelevant for society to know that. But, if the President gets sick, it can be on the news because it is the President and it’s important to know if he’s able to do his job.
So we get to a controversial thing here because I said before that the way journalism works is one of the reasons for the media’s silence in the face of the Ukrainian war, but I also said that wars were a news value. Well, what I didn’t say is that all the news has an expiration date, they get old fast. Once that happens, another one must get in their place and what was once a piece of news is not anymore, it’s just old and non-relevant news.
The editor’s thoughts are also like that. If local people aren’t being directly affected by the war and it’s just not that important to them, your local news will stop talking about it at a certain point because there are “more important” things to talk about now.
The ‘saturation’ of the subject in the media
After we see a lot of something on the internet, commonly, we get saturated with it. When we analyze it is pretty similar to the life cycle of a fashion trend, but as a matter of fact, we can’t treat a war it’s a trend. A war is never a trend. Unfortunately, it seems that even the most important news channels think it is, because when the subject started to “saturate” they stopped to give visibility to that people.
We must think, is the system guilty? Yes, but not only. We can’t just blame the system and not reflect, why is it like this? As consumers, it is also our fault because we stop giving the audience everything they want and, without the audience, the channels won’t publish about it. It is a sign that the subject has saturated or lost relevance.
The beginning of the Palestine x Israel War
When new news arrives, the latest ones lose relevance. That happened with the beginning of the Palestine and Israel war. All the media turned to that new war but forgot about the other one. That is so serious that it is even difficult to find current data on the Ukrainian war because no one is talking about it anymore. However, they are both important and have the same relevance. The media should talk about them both.
Now that we see the causes, let’s see the consequences. What are the consequences of not giving the Ukrainian war the relevance that it deserves?
Well, if no one is looking, it leaves space for war crimes to never be punished. Another thing is the fact that the people who suffer the pain of the war lose their voices. They become practically invisible without the media. And if we can’t see their pain, we can’t help, we can’t pressure the governments to stop the war because most of the people don’t even remember that this war is still happening. That is serious!
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The article above was edited by Clarissa Palácio.
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