The last year has been one big real-time case study in how corporate media outlets loyally obsess over the crimes of Western enemies while underplaying or ignoring those of Western allies. But important new book Worthy and Unworthy delves into this blatant media bias. And via deep analysis, it reveals how the propaganda model of Western media works.
The Canary spoke to the book’s author Devan Hawkins. And our second article on the book focuses in particular on how the corporate media obsesses over Russia’s crimes while underplaying similar crimes from Western allies. This clear media bias places Russia on a pedestal of evil for many people in the West, grooming them to support possible military action against the superpower in the future.
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent previously argued that corporate media outlets split victims of violence or injustice into two groups – ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’. And this designation determines how, and how much, the media reports on these people’s struggles. In Worthy and Unworthy, Hawkins tested the theory, finding it even more relevant today than when Chomsky and Herman first put it forward.
‘Going along with the government line’
In his book, Hawkins focused on analysing the coverage of the New York Times. He said he doesn’t see himself as a critic of the paper, because he recognises “journalism is hard work”. But overall, he insisted that the paper of record “goes along with the government line on official state enemies”, providing clearly more negative coverage of countries like Russia and China. Likewise, regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the paper has faced accusations of favouring Israel and downplaying the war crimes that international courts, human rights groups, and other experts have condemned. Regarding both official allies and enemies, Hawkins said in the book’s introduction, there is “general uniformity in political perspectives about foreign affairs” among Democratic and Republican elites in the US, and that “is reflected in media coverage” too.
Hawkins told the Canary that the New York Times may go along with the state line for a number of reasons. It could be “availability of sources”, in that it’s “easier to go to government sources”; the power of advertising money, and the fear of losing it; or the influence of thinktanks, many of which get funding from the military industrial complex or from controversial US government groups like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which journalist and author Matt Kennard has called “an overt CIA”. Hawkins explained that “we have conflicts of interest that need to be disclosed”, and would like to research the reasons for bias even more. “It’s so important to be documenting this and paying attention to it,” he stressed.
Unevenly covering the bombings in Syria and Yemen
One of the cases studies Hawkins did to analyse the uneven coverage of similar issues was the Russian and Saudi Arabian interventions in the Syrian and Yemeni conflicts. And he explained that:
In both cases, there was fairly extensive coverage. But I only look at one month, basically… in the case of the Russian intervention, and compared it to 2 months total for the Saudi intervention. Overall, the shorter time period got more attention for the Russian intervention, and the Saudi intervention got less attention both in the specific months that were considered and during the overall time period.
Having looked at the scale of the interventions, he said:
the number of bombings, and the also the number of kills, would all suggest that the initial period of the Saudi intervention was much bigger scale than Russia’s intervention.
Explaining why Russia’s intervention received more coverage, he said it was:
Both because of the fact that Russia is again like an official State enemy, and they were supporting a government that… the US has an antagonistic relation with – the Assad government, and at the same time obviously Saudi Arabia being one of the US’s closest geopolitical allies in the region, and because their intervention was against a movement, the Houthis, which are seen as being very closely aligned with Iran. So I think all those work together. And I should note that in this case there’s a direct involvement of the US. Because that intervention would not have been possible without the millions in arms sales like from the US to Saudi Arabia.
The nature of the coverage, meanwhile, was also different. “There was some critical coverage of the Saudi intervention”, he said, but nothing like the coverage of Russia’s, which was “universally negative”.
Worthy and unworthy dissidents
“One of the most informative” chapters, Hawkins told us, was one looking at the treatment of dissidents. In particular, he covered Russia’s persecution of Alexei Navalny, and compared it to Spain’s persecution of Catalan independence politicians whose initial sentences were “greater than the sentencing that went to Alexei Navalny”.
The Catalan figures had a “wide base of support” and there were “massive protests against their arrest” that were “much bigger in scale than the protests that happened in response to the arrest and sentencing of Alexei Navalny”. Nonetheless, Hawkins insisted, the dissident of an “official state enemy, Russia” (i.e. Navalny), got “much more attention than many more dissidents in a friendlier country, Spain”. Talking about the Catalan independence issue, he added:
I was really surprised about how, universally, there seemed to be almost no sympathy.
In a similar way, Hawkins looked at musical dissidents. He analysed coverage of protests from punk-rockers Pussy Riot in Russia, and of the arrest and trial of Catalan rapper Pablo Hasél. In the case of Hasél, there was “almost nothing that was mentioned about him, even though there were pretty large protests”. But the New York Times gave Pussy Riot “much, much more attention”.
Yet more examples in Worthy and Unworthy
There are undoubtedly countless more examples of the media highlighting Russia’s crimes at the expense of Western-backed crimes. But Hawkins also took a brief look at two cases close to Russia, in Ukraine and Belarus – both historically aligned with Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. And this analysis adds some extra colour to the picture of Western media bias.
Another issue Hawkins evaluated was coverage of the Euromaidan protest in Ukraine from 2013 to 2014 – an important precursor to Russia’s current war in the country. And he pointed out that “a lot of the nuance was missing”, such as “the fact that Ukraine was a highly divided society” and that “there were legitimate questions about what was a better economic deal for the country” between Europe’s and Russia’s. “Any role that the US was playing,” he stressed, “didn’t get much attention”. Finally, he noted the difference between coverage treating some protesters as “pro-Russian” but others as “Ukrainian”, even though the former were also Ukrainians.
Finally, he reflected on the critical coverage of the grounding of a Belarusian dissident’s plane in comparison to the grounding of Bolivian president Evo Morales’s plane, which was thought to be also transporting US dissident Edward Snowden. There was “very little attention” on or criticism of the latter when Hawkins compared it to the former. And as he said:
Imagine if Russia reported to some countries that Alexei Navalny was on a plane, and those countries shut off their airspace on a plane that was carrying a head of state to force it to land in those countries.
The Canary will be releasing more articles on the comparisons Hawkins made in his book in the coming weeks. You can see the first article in the series here.
