It is easy to know the mass media view on a situation by noticing whether the description is of victims or conflict.
When the sufferers are disliked by the mass media, then the situation is described as a conflict - as is the case for Christians being slaughtered in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia; the situation in these places is misdescribed as a 'conflict' - which makes about as much sense as describing the Soviet, Maoist or Nazi mass persecutions as examples of 'conflict'.
On the other hand, when the aggressors are regarded positively by the mass media - 'minorities' in developed nations, lethal violence against men by women - then the perpetrators of violence are regarded as victims. The assumption (which, because it is an assumption, does not need to be proved and cannot be disproved) is that aggression is a product of victimhood.
So: When the group is favoured, they are suffering 'victims' no matter who is attacking whom; when the group is disfavoured the situation is described as a 'conflict' and in war-like terms, no matter the disproportion of power and violence between the sides - so that disfavoured individuals being rounded-up and beaten, expelled, or killed is always a 'conflict' no matter how one sided - even when the sufferers are unarmed, passive, helpless.
The slightest complaint or resistance to being annihilated on the part of a disfavoured group is enough to enable the mass media to see the situation as an - implicitly symmetrical - conflict.
1 comment:
Exactly. Thanks for noticing and clarifying something that I have been vaguely aware of for some time without defining it.
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