Victims of violence receive broadly varying types of media attention and representation depending on two factors: One, who perpetrated the violence and two, who was the violence perpetrated against. This is not news. Scholars of the likes of Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Mark Curtis, Alan MacLeod or Devan Hawkins have written extensively about the distinction between what has been termed worthy and unworthy victims.
While this distinction is arguably universal, when we focus on western media outlets specifically, there is clearly an abundance of unworthy victims. This is a simple consequence of the fact that the so-called West is involved in so many conflicts simultaneously – Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, to name just a few – and its victims predictably receive very little attention in western media. Even though Israel’s actions in Gaza have been called a genocide by a majority of genocide scholars and human rights organizations, Palestinian victims have never received the same kind of media attention, representation and compassion that, say, Ukrainian victims of Russian violence or Israeli victims of Palestinian violence have. Thus, while we were familiarized with Israeli victims’ names, families, life stories and dreams, Palestinian victims have been large invisible, condemned to be mentioned only as numbers, their stories questioned and scrutinized. With very few exceptions, no names, no families, no life dreams were presented to news audiences in the western hemisphere.
Again, the fact that this distinction exists is barely news. However, from an analytical viewpoint the question becomes how we can make news consumers more aware of what Lilie Chouliaraki has called ‘regimes of pity’, and familiarize them with the traits to look out for, and the characteristics which define the representation of worthiness in media discourse. And while Herman and Chomsky, for instance, provided a number of detailed case studies in their book Manufacturing Consent, the analytical tools for an investigation into worthy/unworthy victims have so far not been fully formalized.
In my encyclopedia entry “Representations of Victimhood in Media Reporting of Armed Conflicts,” I discuss six aspects that help analyze whether or to what degree victims of violence are perceived as worthy victims or not.
1. Sources
This aspect was already proposed by Herman and Chomsky in their original Propaganda Model. When there are victims who were brutalized by the enemy side, heavy use of eyewitnesses, of refugees, of friends or family of the victims is to be expected; this is because drawing on first-hand accounts of people who witnessed the event with their own eyes provides an emotional proximity – we feel as though we were there to see it, too, while giving background information about the victim transforms them into three-dimensional, real human beings. Conversely, when ‘our’ side is responsible for the violence, the expectation is that official sources will feature prominently. This achieves emotional distancing as we are confronted with a lot of matter-of-factly statements by spokespeople representing the perpetrators of the violence, who at length express their concern for human life, offer justifications and promise to investigate. The victims’ voices do not really feature in such reports, and therefore, we are not put in a position where we can envisage, let alone empathize with them. They are not individuals, only numbers. There are numerous studies that have shown this mechanism at work.
Besides the question of who gets to speak, however, another concern from a linguistic perspective is also how the sources are described to either legitimize or delegitimize them. Here, looking at factors like adjectives or relative clauses can be useful, as these tweak the representation of the featured sources, which can serve to make them appear knowledgeable and credible, or biased and unreliable. For instance, in stories about alleged Russian interference in western politics, sources supporting the western narrative are frequently described as “independent”, “bipartisan”, “liberal”, “non-profit” or “non-partisan” to imply that they are without an agenda. They are called “experts”, “professors”, “researchers” or “advisers”, which conveys expertise. Conversely, pro-Russian sources get labelled as “spokeswoman”, “press secretary”, or “state media journalist”, while highlighting that they are “Kremlin-backed”, “pro-Kremlin” or otherwise “financed by the Russian government”. This way, pro-western sources are discursively represented as objective and reliable, whereas Russian information is construed as inherently and expectedly biased and monolithic. A similar delegitimization tactic can be found in the discourse on Israel’s war on Gaza where Palestinian casualty figures are frequently attributed to the “Hamas-run Health Ministry”, thus suggesting that they cannot be fully trusted. By legitimizing sources from the one side and delegitimizing sources from the other, victimhood gets constructed and framed through the prism of who ‘our’ side considers worthy.
2. Use of evaluative language
Another aspect to look out for is the use of evaluative language, which is language that reveals the author’s perspective and judgment. In essence, such language shows readers what the author views as good or bad, desirable or undesirable, likely or unlikely and so on. In the context of wars, the use of language is often guided by axiomatic assumptions about ‘us’ and ‘them’, and therefore reflects and reinforces a biased understanding of the conflict. In the discourse on Gaza, as Des Freedman has noted, October 7 – Hamas’ surprise incursion into Israel – is described using words like “atrocity”, “slaughter”, “massacred” or “hostages”; conversely, Palestinian suffering at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces is represented using much more sober words: “suffering”, “deaths”, “killed” or “detainees”. The effect of such spin words is to portray the violence of one side as much more despicable than that of the other side – the latter consequently even seems justified by comparison. This by extension evokes more empathy with victims of the former.
We can see something similar in the way that the respective belligerents are described. In my own study on the battles for Aleppo, Syria, and for Mosul, Iraq, there was a clear dichotomy: ‘we’ have a ‘government’, ‘they’ have a ‘regime’; ‘we’ have ‘special forces’, ‘counter-terrorism forces’, ‘elite forces’, ‘they’ have ‘militias’, ‘regime troops’ or ‘proxies’; when ‘we’ conquer territory it gets ‘liberated’, when ‘they’ do it, it ‘falls’. This dichotomy portrays the violence of one side as much more legitimate than that of the other party, which arguably has an effect on how victimhood is perceived. In the case of Aleppo, the use of negative evaluation was largely a consequence of western enemies – Russia and the Syrian Assad government – fighting Islamist forces that the West supported. In the case of Mosul, the evaluation was positive, because the West was fighting Islamist forces that were threatening their own geopolitical goals.
3. Transitivity
When it comes to the perception and evaluation of violence, the concept of transitivity is also central. Transitivity is the grammatical system that allows us to express who is doing what to whom. In a regular sentence using the active voice, for a verb such as ‘kill’, grammar demands that we have a subject (the agent or doer of the action) as well as the direct object (the patient or the one affected by the action). In such a sentence, we get a clear attribution of who is the perpetrator of violence and who is the victim. There are, however, various ways in which transitivity can be manipulated. When the sentence “A killed B” is transformed into the passive voice – “B was killed by A” – not only is the focus now on the victim, but the perpetrator can also be left out entirely (“B was killed”). Another tactic is to turn the verb into a noun to get “the killing of B”, which additionally portrays the action more like an event, as something that just happens (omitting who did the killing), and it also omits tense (when did it happen) and aspect (is it a completed action or still ongoing). Finally, by using an intransitive verb (‘die’), which requires no object, instead of a transitive one (‘kill’), which does, agency can be taken out of the equation altogether.
In conflict reporting, including or omitting agency has a clear impact on whether we understand the violence as intentional and directed or as unintended and collateral. So, in a headline such as “Russian airstrikes in Syria killed 2000 civilians in six months”, the readers get a clear idea of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim, as well as that the violence is an intended consequence. By comparison, in a headline that states “US reviewing airstrike that corresponds to site where 200 Iraqi civilians died”, the killing is presented as an event (‘died’), it is unattributed (whose ‘airstrikes’?) and dislocated from the action (‘corresponds to site’). This can sometimes reach spectacular dimensions: “Explosion Gazans say was airstrike leaves many casualties in dense neighborhood” was the headline of a New York Times article on an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp in Gaza that uses the whole arsenal of delegitimization. The event is called an ‘explosion’, the fact that it was an airstrike is presented as hearsay (‘Gazans say’), the killing is euphemized (‘leaves many casualties’) and there is no attribution of responsibility. Worthy victims are killed, unworthy ones just die.
4. Context
In order to manage the degree of worthiness of victims, the use of context that humanizes them can be key. It makes a considerable difference whether victims are presented as a number or mere statistics, or whether they are introduced as individuals with a name. Additional weight can be assigned by giving voice to family or friends who provide personal details about the victims, or by describing what happened to them in painful detail. The following is an example from a killing and revenge killing involving Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank in 2014. The first excerpt is from a report on the aftermath of the killing of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinians:
Through the trees and over the valleys the mourners came in a display of national unity that expressed Israel’s revulsion at the murders of three teenagers.
Thousands of Israelis – young and old, many of them religiously devout – defied 90 degree temperatures to pay their last respects on Tuesday to Gilad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel, both 16, and Eyal Yifrah, 19, whose deaths have sent shock waves through the Jewish state.
The teenagers’ remains were discovered on Monday, 18 days after they were last seen on June 12 trying to hitch a lift from outside the Gush Etzion settlement in the West Bank.The trio were shot after being abducted – according to Israeli authorities – by two known members of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group.
A day after their bodies were found hidden under rocks in an isolated field near Hebron, the youths were buried at the vast Modi’in cemetery in central Israel in a mass public event whose tone and dimensions resembled a state funeral.
They were brought to the cemetery in ambulances, their coffins wrapped in Israeli flags, after leaving their three home communities in separate processions. (Telegraph, July 1, 2014)
It includes the names and age of the teenagers, it describes how they were killed, where they were found and how they were recovered. It also frames all this in terms of a national tragedy. The article later features extensive quotes from mourners. Compare that to the report on the revenge killing of a Palestinian teenager by Israelis a few days later:
Israeli-Palestinian tensions were stoked further on Saturday after it was reported that an Arab teenager suspected to have been abducted and murdered by Jewish extremists was burned to death.
The disclosure came from Mohammed al-A’wewy, the Palestinian attorney general, whose comments appeared to confirm rumours surrounding the death of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, whose charred body was found in a forest on the outskirts of Jerusalem last Wednesday.
It followed three days of rioting that left scenes of destruction in East Jerusalem’s Shuafat neigbourhood before spreading on Friday to other Palestinian areas of the city and Arab towns in Israel.
“The direct cause of death was burns as a result of fire and it’s complications,” Wafa, a Palestinian news agency quoted Mr al-A’wewy as saying.
His comments were based on the findings of an autopsy conducted at Israel’s Abu Kabir forensic institute in Tel Aviv and attended by Sabr al-Aloul, the chief Palestinian forensic specialist. (Telegraph, July 5, 2014)
While we do get name and age of the victim, his mode of death is described in very technical terms by an attorney general, rather than in the words of friends or family. There is no emotional introduction to the story as in the previous example, the language chosen is almost clinically sober. The killing is also immediately juxtaposed to ‘riots’ in the Palestinian territories, insinuating that the riots and the killing are somehow connected. Notably, there is no emotional activation of humanization of the victim; his death is reported on like a technicality.
Another type of context that may lead to a different evaluation of the victims is historical background. When an act of violence is not described in isolation, but rather embedded in a historical narrative, it may be conceived of as a causal result of a previous event and therefore seen to be to some degree justified by it. For example, after October 7, 2023, it has become customary for western news reports from Gaza, but also the West Bank, to feature a paragraph referring to Hamas’ attack on Israel that day, implying that all that followed was only a reaction to, and would not have happened without, October 7. This causality, however, could easily be reversed if any act of Palestinian violence were to be discussed in relation to a precedent of Israeli violence directed against Palestinians. The worthiness of the victims is thus evaluated in relation to where the violence is pinpointed as having originated.
5. Framing
Acts of violence can either be condemned or legitimized depending on how media frames them: are they a brutal act of cold-blooded murder or an unfortunate accident? In a famous study, Robert Entman showed how two similar events – the downing of a Korean airliner by the Soviet Union and the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by US forces – were framed differently. One was described as wanton murder without any kind of justification, whereas the other was framed as an honest mistake, as an understandable decision taken under enormous pressure. The victims of the Soviet Union were worthy because their killing was presented as exemplary of the unscrupulous and ruthless nature of the enemy; the victims of US forces were unworthy because they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The blame for the deaths is therefore on the victims, not the perpetrators.
Additionally, it makes a difference whether news reports use what Shanto Iyengar has termed episodic or thematic framing. While thematic framing contextualizes an event and leads to a societal attribution of responsibility, episodic framing focuses on the event largely in isolation and tends to result in an individual attribution of responsibility. Thus, when an act of violence is embedded in a broader narrative about social, political and military oppression, readers are much more likely to show empathy and demand addressing the underlying causes of the violence; conversely, when the focus is on the individual act of violence without any meaningful background information, people’s judgement is guided towards individual guilt. Thus, when violence is embedded in meaningful and explanatory context, this may lead audiences to evaluate it as understandable, if not justified. The victims then become unworthy of compassion, as they essentially brought it upon themselves.
6. Images
Besides the written word, images also play an important role in constructing worthiness. Seeing pictures of human suffering is more likely to elicit compassion than pictures of destroyed buildings, and, in turn, this is more likely to motivate the audience to demand an improvement of the situation. Various studies have shown that news media tend to focus on images of destruction in the context of violence directed against people their governments are unaffiliated with, whereas human suffering takes center stage in imagery when the affected are allies.
The same mechanics apply to pictures of individuals, which are more likely to create an emotional connection than pictures of masses of people, which rather evoke a sense of threat. Oftentimes, stories of refugees will feature pictures of large masses of people, thus prompting feelings of fear. In the case of Alan Kurdi, a refugee boy who was washed up at the shores of Turkey during the Syrian war, the victim received individual shots because his image was instrumental to illustrating the deplorable violence of a conflict pursued by an official western enemy – to portray the enemy as nefarious, and the West as compassionate. It also led to a considerable public outcry. Therefore, when victims of violence are individualized and their suffering is made visible, people show a greater tendency to commiserate with them than if they are presented as an amorphous mass, or if they are made invisible using pictures that focus solely on physical destruction.
Overall, analyzing victimhood in media reporting can be a quite complex task and it requires time and resources. However, with time certain predictable patterns emerge. Victims of western crimes hardly ever qualify as worthy victims, while every victim of enemy aggression is capitalized on as a visceral illustration of their cruelty. This is a logical consequence of media choices when it comes to sources: emotionally distanced officials when it’s ‘our crimes’, eye witnesses, dissidents or refugees when it’s ‘theirs’. Most of the other aspects discussed above follow almost organically since the initial framing of sources is frequently simply adopted and multiplied. Being aware of the reasons for why we are permitted to feel empathy for certain victims, yet refused the same right for others, even though they are all human beings, allows us to penetrate the dehumanizing discourse on victims of western violence and to defy what Stephen McCloskey has called a ‘hierarchy of victims’, imposed by politicians and media figures. If this hierarchy is not deconstructed, there is a real danger that we in the West will continue to think that “war is natural for people of color, while white people naturally gravitate towards peace” (Moustafa Bayoumi), and therefore see war and suffering in faraway countries as almost inevitable, rather than caused by human behavior, and driven by geopolitics.
References
Bayoumi, Moustafa (2022). “They are ‘civilised’ and ‘look like us’: the racist coverage of Ukraine.” The Guardian. Online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civilised-european-look-like-us-racist-coverage-ukraine
Scherling, Johannes (2026a). “Representations of Victimhood in Media Reporting of Armed Conflicts.” Encyclopedia, 6(3), 54. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia6030054
Tait, Robert (2014a). “Israel buries its three kidnapped teenagers amid tears and anger.” The Telegraph. Online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10939348/Israel-buries-its-three-kidnapped-teenagers-amid-tears-and-anger.html
Tait, Robert (2014b). “Murdered youth ‘burned alive’, says Palestinian official.” The Telegraph. Online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/10948417/Murdered-youth-burned-alive-says-Palestinian-official.html
(Featured Image: “An aerial view showing destruction in Rafah after Israeli forces withdrawal and as the ceasefire took hold, Gaza Strip” by Ashraf Amra is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.)
