Representations of Victimhood in Media Reporting of Armed Conflicts

Definition

Victimhood in media discourse refers to how individuals or groups subjected to harm are represented and made visible to the public. These representations shape whether audiences respond with empathy or emotional distance, in particular as it pertains to mass violence events such as wars. News texts can humanize suffering by providing personal detail, evocative language, and contextual depth; or they can neutralize it through detached, fact-focused reporting. The extent to which people are perceived as “worthy victims” depends not only on the words and images chosen but also on the surrounding narrative—whether the event is framed as intentional harm or an unfortunate incident, whether victims are named and individualized or rendered as anonymous masses. In this way, media reporting does not merely record suffering but actively constructs hierarchies of victimhood, influencing who appears deserving of compassion and whose suffering remains invisible or muted.

1. Introduction

This entry provides an overview of established research methods to analyze media discourse with regard to the representation of victims of war as either worthy or unworthy. It draws on various studies and examples from contemporary conflicts such as Ukraine, Syria, or Gaza, with a focus on how victims are portrayed in western media. While this entry primarily uses western (US/UK) media as a case study to illustrate these dynamics—given their global influence via wire services like Reuters and Associated Press (AP)—the structural mechanisms producing victimhood hierarchies are not unique to the West. Similar patterns of selective attention and worthiness attribution occur in diverse media ecosystems worldwide, shaped by the respective local political, geostrategic, and institutional priorities.

The entry shows how the representation of victims can be analyzed and extracted; it does not assess or endorse the empirical validity or accurateness of any competing narratives or claims. Since media outlets of any given ideological leaning have their respective biases, the answer to the question of which victims are deemed worthy and which unworthy will undoubtedly vary. By focusing on the linguistic representation of the actors, the methods presented in this entry are designed to be applicable to any kind of media discourse underpinned by any kind of ideological belief.

According to Hall, representation is “the process by which members of a culture use language […] to produce meaning” [1] (p. 45). However, since using language is never a neutral act [2], the process of representation will always be subjective and biased. This tendency intensifies when other factors come into play that emphasize and consolidate such biases, as is the case in media systems. How these factors impact the representation of the news is a central concern of media representation studies. Some of the biases that media studies analyze are attributable to the human factor, whereas others can be traced back to issues like editorial policy, ideological alignment, regional vicinity, news values or economic constraints [3,4,5]. This means that media representation—how and what is represented—is “necessarily selective” [6] (p. 87) and always occurs through a variety of filters. It can therefore never be an accurate reflection of the reality on the ground, let alone objective. According to Tuchman, objectivity, consequently, is little less than a “strategic ritual protecting newspapermen from the risks of their trade” [7] (p. 660), in particular as it pertains to topics that are highly contested, emotional and emotionalized, such as war and conflict.

These two, war and conflict, are topics that make the news. Their characteristics—violence, chaos, suffering—virtually guarantee newsworthiness. In a perfect world, we would assume that any suffering and any victim should receive the same amount of attention, the same amount of compassion and empathy, and the same amount of media space. However, in reality, victims are not created equal, at least on a discursive level. According to Greer, victimhood is not an objective state in media discourse. Instead, “the definition of who may legitimately claim victim status is profoundly influenced by social divisions including class, race, ethnicity, gender, age and sexuality” [8] (p. 21). He contends that, based on how close people are—or are perceived to be—to what Christie calls the ‘ideal victim’ [9]—vulnerable, defenseless, innocent—media coverage is likely to become more and more extensive, emotional and long-lasting (on a related note, a study by Lewis, Hamilton and Elmore (2021) has indicated that people indeed tend to describe victims they sympathize with along the lines of the ‘ideal victim’ [10]). Based on this, he has proposed a ‘hierarchy of victimization’, which results in an unequal representation of victimhood.

In a similar vein, and drawing on the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, McCloskey speaks of a “hierarchy of victims” [11], in which certain victims receive an abundance of coverage in western media, whereas others do not. This distinction, he argues, runs mostly along ethnic lines, where Caucasian people are seen as more deserving of compassion and calls to action than are people from the Middle East, from Africa or Latin America, for instance. Entman and Rojecki reached a similar conclusion. In their analysis of local crime news, the number of white victims covered was 50% higher than that of black victims, despite the fact that African-Americans are more likely to be victims. They suggest that this is because “a Black murder victim in a Harlem tenement conforms to expectations, so is less newsworthy than a White corpse in a midtown penthouse”, implying that “[w]hite life is more valuable than Black” [12] (p. 81). When it comes to violence in faraway places, Chouliaraki emphasizes that “our relationship with distant suffering is made possible, or thinkable at all, by means of [news] discourse” [13] (p. 4) and that the manner in which audiences react to victimhood is predicated on “the ways in which particular news texts present the sufferer as a moral cause to western spectators” [13] (p. 6). Patriotism, in connection with the ‘rally ‘round the flag’ phenomenon, has also been shown to shape the way that journalists cover violence in war, as well as how victims of violence are perceived [14,15,16].

This hierarchization has a particular effect. In the so-called West, the wars we read about are mostly removed from our immediate perception. This means that we are dependent on what media tell us—firstly, to know that an event has happened to begin with and secondly, to be able to categorize, comprehend and evaluate it. Chouliaraki stresses that “witnessing the event [of suffering] and its disastrous aftermath […] is important in evoking emotion and, thereby, a sense of care and responsibility for the distant sufferer” [13] (p. 1). However, when victims of different conflicts are presented to us with varying degrees of emotionality and depth, this may lead to media audiences seeing only a part of such victims as deserving of empathy.

Analyses of this phenomenon can be structural, focusing on systemic filters such as ownership, sourcing, and political economy, or discursive, emphasizing the textual and visual strategies through which victims are represented. This entry combines both perspectives to show how structures and texts jointly produce hierarchies of victimhood and, in doing so, uses examples from both academic and journalistic analysis. Based on Herman and Chomsky’s concept of worthiness of victims, this entry will draw on a variety of established research to demonstrate which aspects of news reporting support the representation of victims as either worthy or unworthy. The examples used are intended as illustrations for how such an analysis may be conducted, but the methodology is applicable to any kind of conflict situation. The point of these examples is not to evaluate biases in terms of right or wrong—which would go beyond the possibilities of linguistic analysis—but rather to highlight that there are biases in the depiction of victims and how to detect them. In summarizing findings from critical media research, this entry does not assess the truth value of competing claims, but outlines how representation operates discursively. While the focus will mainly be on US and UK media outlets, research has shown that due to the US-centric structure of major news agencies such as Reuters, Associated Press or Bloomberg, there is a considerable tendency for these views to be ‘globalized’ and therefore to affect news coverage in countries across the globe [17].

2. Worthiness

A key concept with regard to these hierarchies is Herman and Chomsky’s [3] influential distinction between ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims. In Manufacturing Consent, they argue that, in American media, victims aligned with US interests are portrayed with sympathy and detail, while those harmed by the US or its allies are covered with less attention and context. They propose that vested interests of ownership and advertisers, the dominant use of official sources, fear of flak (or criticism) as well as axiomatic assumptions of who is good and who is bad act as filters and gatekeepers; they allow only certain news to become big news and only certain victims to become visible. This framework, while not without its flaws, still remains central to understanding how media confer or withhold victim status [18].

Herman and Chomsky define worthy victims as victims that are potentially feature article material. They are described in great detail and further humanized using empathy-inducing context, such as statements by family and friends. Unworthy victims, on the other hand, are only mentioned superficially, sometimes using only numbers, and they are barely awarded any personal detail or context that might humanize them to the audience, which is then likely to remain indifferent to their fate [3] (p. 35).

The way in which media present victims is arguably central to how these will be perceived by the audience, as shown by various audience studies conducted by the Glasgow University Media Group [19,20]. In this context, Chouliaraki distinguishes between different ‘regimes of pity’—adventure, emergency and ecstatic news [13] (p. 8). Adventure news are defined as “news of suffering without pity” consisting of “short reports accompanied by maps” [13] (p. 10). They do not evoke any emotion. Emergency news, on the other hand, are “news of suffering with pity” [13] (p. 10), because they include images and language choice prone to evoke compassion. Finally, ecstatic news—Chouliaraki mentions the reporting of 9/11 here—are news that bring the sufferers “as close to the […] spectators as possible”, using images as well as “sentimental empathy, political denunciation and reflexive contemplation” [13] (p. 11), thus having these events intrude into our personal safe zones and making the suffering palpable, as it were.

The choice of which victims of war receive what kind of treatment by western media is arguably shaped by what Said and others have referred to as orientalist logic [21] as well as by elite interests of governments or transnational corporations. The latter derives naturally from the five filters proposed by Herman and Chomsky: those who serve the elites’ interests will be worthy victims (e.g., victims of enemy regimes); those who are obstacles to their interests will be unworthy (e.g., ‘our’ victims or victims of friendly regimes) [3] (p. 34). The former can be seen, for instance, in the way some western media pundits have been talking about victims of Russia’s war in Ukraine. They are worthy victims, according to Herman and Chomsky’s definition, both because they are victims of violence perpetrated by an enemy regime and because they are ‘like us’. Bayoumi, in a piece in the British Guardian newspaper, mentions a number of examples that illustrate implicit racist or orientalist attitudes:

On France’s BFM [Business FM] TV, Phillipe Corbé stated this about Ukraine: “We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin. We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.”

[…]

An ITV [Independent Television] journalist reporting from Poland said: “Now the unthinkable has happened to them. And this is not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe!”

[…]

And writing in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan explained: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations” [22].

In response to this type of coverage, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) issued the following statement: “This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America” [23]. Such statements as the ones referred to by Bayumi, therefore, visualize a certain mindset that usually remains unspoken and that illustrates that there is indeed a ‘hierarchy of victims’ and a hierarchy of worthiness in western media.

Even when this hierarchy of victimhood is not stated as explicitly as above, a linguistic analysis can enable us to identify markers to that effect. Combined with an analysis of background context—present or omitted—this provides a toolset to deconstruct imbalances in the degree to which people are permitted and perceived to be victims.

3. Key Features of Representation

Drawing on Herman and Chomsky’s notion of ‘worthy and unworthy victims’ [3], a number of aspects present themselves as meriting analysis. The most relevant ones for the purpose of analyzing the worthiness of victims are the use of sources, evaluative language, transitivity, context, frames and images.

3.1. Use of Sources

Herman and Chomsky propose that the use of sources will vary depending on whether the story relates to victims of one’s own abuses or of enemy abuses. For one’s own abuses, heavy and uncritical use of official sources is expected [3] (p. 34). As Hall and colleagues [24] argued in their study of ‘primary definers,’ those actors who are granted speaking authority in the media often set the interpretive frame for how an event is understood. Subsequent research by Hallin [25] and Manning [26] has consistently shown that reliance on official sources privileges dominant perspectives, while marginalizing dissenting or victim voices. In the context of victimhood representation, this means that the same officials implicated in the suffering in question get to frame their crimes. They get to create the labels and they get to deflect. The effect is to downplay and dilute the gravity of the event. When, however, enemies are responsible for the violence, Herman and Chomsky anticipate heavy use of refugee, dissident or eyewitness voices. This has the effect of zooming into what happened and adding first-hand accounts of the suffering, therefore evoking a more lively picture of the atrocities in the media audience [3] (p. 34).

For instance, a study on the battles for Aleppo (Syria) and Mosul (Iraq) has shown considerable differences in the use of sources. In Aleppo, the Syrian Army supported by Russian bombers—official enemies of the West—were the perpetrators of the violence, whereas in Mosul, it was a US-led coalition, the ‘us’. The analysis illustrated that for Aleppo, there was “heavy use of unofficial sources […], of eyewitnesses on the ground, of doctors, helpers, rebel spokespersons—often summarily called ‘activists’—who narrate and comment in great detail on their experience under regime bombardment” [27] (p. 203). For Mosul, on the other hand, “[t]here is heavy use of official sources […]—both military and governmental—that are allowed to comment on the events and to explain and justify civilian casualties” [27] (p. 204). In doing so, victims in the battle for Aleppo were given much more prominence, with names, stories and first-hand accounts, while the victims in the battle for Mosul were explained away as casualties of war, establishing the hierarchy of victims that McClosky speaks of [11]. In another study, el-Nawawy and Elmasry compared media coverage of Ukrainian and Syrian refugees and have shown that official sources, by a significant amount, were more frequently used in covering Syrian refugees—framing them as a threat—than for Ukrainian refugees, which were described in a way likely to elicit empathy by framing the events as a humanitarian crisis [28]. This relates back to the categorization of victims based on ethnic lines.

Beyond the question of who is granted space to speak, legitimacy is also constructed by how sources are described. It is therefore necessary to identify the main framers of the story, those who are given a ‘right to speak’ and so to impart their view of events on journalists and news consumers. In order to do this, applying Talbot’s concept of the ‘text population’ is useful [29]. The term ‘text population’ includes any actor or event that ‘inhabits’ a text. With regard to sources, this means to identify those noun phrases (e.g., noun, adjective + noun, noun + relative clause) that refer to whoever is given the floor to speak in a news text. When sources are described using legitimacy-boosting qualifiers, this affords credibility to them, whereas when they are described using terms that suggest bias or character deficiencies, this instills doubt in their reliability. Scherling and Foltz, for instance, have shown how such descriptors were used in reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic to attribute expertise and credibility to certain sources, while simultaneously ensuring that other sources were seen as untrustworthy [30]. Van Leeuwen and Wodak [31] demonstrate that authority can be discursively boosted or undermined through labels, credentials, or moral evaluation. Richardson [32] similarly shows that Muslim voices in the British press were often introduced with distancing descriptors such as “so-called leaders” or “radical clerics,” in contrast to the legitimizing titles routinely accorded to government officials. Such naming strategies function to elevate certain perspectives while delegitimizing others, thereby reinforcing hierarchies of worthiness in news reporting.

Devaluation of sources can also be achieved by adding terms or phrases that cast doubt on the veracity of victims’ claims. A common tactic observed in the media in the context of the war on Gaza is adding the modifier ‘Hamas-run’ to reports about casualties in the Gaza Strip. Inlakesh states that “Western media often refers to the Palestinian death toll as coming from the ‘Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry,’ casting doubt on the credibility of the reported figures” [33] (online). A comparative study by El Damanhoury et al. has shown that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) consistently used this delegitimizing modifier in their reporting on the conflict, while the Qatari news outlet Al Jazeera English did not use it [34], arguably because as an Arab voice, they are more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Such modifiers indicating bias are unlikely to be attached in western mainstream media when Israeli sources report casualties. This imbalance makes the victims on the one side more worthy by virtue of being trustworthy and credible, while making the other side potentially deceitful.

3.2. Use of Evaluative Language

Language and, more specifically, language choice are never neutral, but are indicative of a particular worldview [2] (p. 52). Parts of our language choices revolve around words that reflect a certain evaluation of the world. Such evaluative language can, for instance, indicate whether the speaker/writer assesses something to be good or bad, desirable or undesirable, likely or unlikely and so on. Evaluation can happen lexically (e.g., slim/thin/skinny; unfortunately, luckily, sadly) or grammatically (e.g., through the use of modal verbs like may, could, should) [2,35,36].

In the context of victims, the use of evaluation achieves several things. By using particular evaluative lexemes—or spin words—to represent victims, journalists can either boost or decrease their legitimacy. If the victim is described as “Great, and even Legendary”, this makes them seem much more worthy than calling them “a powerful right-wing activist”, as recently happened in the case of the assassination of Charlie Kirk [37].

Freedman, for instance, has shown in the context of the current Israeli war on Gaza, how the two sides are represented differently. For example, when referring to Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, words such as ‘atrocities’, ‘slaughter’, ‘massacred’, or ‘hostages’ are used, whereas when referring to Israeli violence on Palestinian civilians, the words change to ‘suffering’, ‘deaths’, ‘killed’ or ‘detainees’. Words like ‘suffering’ or ‘death’ seem much more like events and are much less emotionally charged than ‘atrocities’ or ‘slaughter’. Death, it seems, just happens to Palestinians, while it is inflicted on Israelis. Likewise, the news would often speak of ‘minors’ in the context of Palestinians, but they speak of Israeli ‘children’ being killed or abducted [38]. The effect of using spin words like these is to portray one side in a conflict as unworthy of empathy, both by boosting their actions as ‘atrocities’ and by downplaying the other side’s actions as circumstantial.

Similarly, MacLeod has shown that, during the coup d’état against then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002, western media consistently portrayed Chavez supporters protesting for his reinstatement as ‘thugs’, ‘fanatical’, ‘frenzied’, ‘hard-core’ or ‘bullies’. At the same time, the opposition, which supported the military coup, were called ‘inspired’, ‘energetic’, ‘democratic’ or ‘civil society’, “even while the inspired democrats were gunning down hard-core bullies” [39] (p. 56). In this case, the mere word choice seems designed to lead the audience to side with the supporters of the coup and the instigators of violence. One can argue that calling somebody ‘fanatical’ or ‘inspired’, ‘frenzied’ or ‘energetic’, is a matter of perspective, but choosing one over the other does evoke different images in readers or viewers.

3.3. Transitivity

Another means of evaluating the worth of victims is through transitivity. When analyzing transitivity, we are basically looking at who does what to whom [40] (p. 79). This is of interest because the choice of whether to phrase something using the active voice or the passive voice (or even the middle voice) can affect whether the semantic roles of agent (the doer) and patient (the affected) are or are not included. In the active voice, both the doer of an action and the affected must be included (‘A shot B’). In the passive voice, the affected is a must (‘B was shot’), whereas the doer can be omitted (‘by A’). The same holds true for nominalization (‘The shooting of B’), where agency is also optional. Additionally, nominalization makes the action seem more like an event, like something that happens rather than something that somebody does. Using an intransitive verb (which requires no object, such as ‘die’) instead of a transitive verb (which needs an object, such as ‘kill’) serves a similar purpose [2] (pp. 75–77).

When transitivity analysis is applied to the representation of victims, it can show patterns. If victims frequently appear in the passive voice or with intransitive verbs, this has the effect of backgrounding agency and responsibility [2] (p. 76). Audiences may then understand the suffering not as something that is intentionally inflicted, but rather as something that naturally occurred. Freedman calls this a form of “dehumanisation and marginalisation” [38] (online). Additionally, according to Abramski et al., such a use of passive voice “can reduce the perceived veracity of the event by the reader” [41] (p. 3).

Headlines, in particular, are very prone to this as their “space constraints cause syntax to be reduced and contracted” [42] (pp. 284–285). This can be seen in the following example by Hanick: “Reuters journalist killed in Lebanon in missile fire from the direction of Israel” [43] (online). The use of the truncated passive omits agency, and the use of “in missile fire” instead of “by missile fire” makes it appear incidental. Norton discusses the use of the passive voice and of intransitive verbs in media headlines on the battle for Mosul in Iraq in 2016/7. He lists headlines such as “US-Led Coalition Confirms Strike on Mosul Site Where Civilians Died”, “US Reviewing Airstrike That Corresponds to Site Where 200 Iraqi Civilians Allegedly Died” or “US-Led Coalition Confirms Strike on Mosul Site Where Civilians Died” [44] (online). All of these make heavy use of nominalizations (‘strike’) and intransitive verbs (‘die’), besides using very vague language (‘corresponds’, ‘allegedly’). Norton maintains that this gives the impression that “Iraqis simply died; they weren’t killed. The airstrike was a mere temporal and geographic coincidence” [44] (online). The deaths become an event, a natural incident and the dead receive no further mention.

In conflicts where official enemies of the West are the perpetrators, a different approach can often be found. For instance, in the Syrian war, headlines like the following were the norm: “Russian airstrikes in Syria killed 2000 civilians in six months” [44] (online). This headline shows a clear attribution of agency (‘Russian’); it employs a transitive verb in the active voice, so we get the perpetrator and the victim, and the victims get labelled as ‘civilians’. This acknowledges their suffering, but also assigns responsibility. A study on media discourse on the Syrian war has further shown that, in the context of the battle for Aleppo, “[t]he killing and destruction of eastern Aleppo are frequently and repeatedly linked to airstrikes by the Syrian government and its Russian allies, while implying this is a deliberate strategy” [27]. Other examples, from the Ukraine war, include “Russian Missiles Hit Ukraine’s Energy System, Again”, “Russian Attacks Crush Factories and Way of Life in Ukrainian Villages” or “Russia Targets Ukraine in Large-Scale Attack”. Here, “agency is clear upfront, as are the deadly consequences of the guilty party’s actions” [45] (online). This is also shown in a study of headlines from the Ukraine war by Muwafi et al. in which the authors maintain that “using the active construction [in headlines] underscores their [the Russian government’s] involvement and the role they play in the ongoing conflict between the two nations. This, in turn, holds them directly accountable for the conflict” [46]. Consequently, whether or not agency is included adds to whether media audiences will feel that people’s deaths are attributable to some perpetrator to be held responsible, or whether they will perceive them as an event.

3.4. Use of Personal and Historical Context

One of Herman and Chomsky’s tenets when it comes to worthy and unworthy victims is the inclusion of context likely to “generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion” [3] (p. 35). Such context can be, for instance, personal details about the victims, such as their names, their families, their future dreams. Another way of eliciting an emotional reaction is by including reactions from family and friends or from local and international politicians.

Further, detailing the atrocity and savagery that the victims were subjected to, is another way of attributing worth to them. For instance, in one of their sample analyses on the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 in El Salvador by US-supported death squads, Herman and Chomsky maintain that “there were very few quotations and expressions of outrage by supporters of Romero. There were no statements or quotations suggesting that the murder was intolerable […] It was quickly placed in the larger framework of alleged killings by both the left and the right that were deeply regretted by Salvadoran and U.S. officials” [3] (p. 48). On the other hand, the murder in 1984 of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko by the hands of the Polish secret police, agents of an enemy regime, was covered in much more detail.

The coverage of the Popieluszko murder was notable for the fullness of the details regarding his treatment by the police and the condition of the recovered body. What is more, these details were repeated at every opportunity […] At the trial, the emotional strain and guilt manifested by police officers were described time and again, interspersed with the description of how Popieluszko pleaded for his life, and evidence of the brutality of the act. […] Popieluszko himself was humanized, with descriptions of his physical characteristics and personality that made him into something more than a distant victim [3] (p. 43).

The difference in the way these two victims of violence were described arguably facilitated and increased the likelihood of activating feelings of compassion for Jerzy Popieluszko, more than for Archbishop Romero.

Notably, context also refers to historical and causal narratives that enrich media reporting by framing an incident not as a singular event, but as embedded in history. When social actors frame a news story, they often invoke a point in history which will render themselves as those reacting, rather than acting. As early as 1922, Lippmann stated in his seminal book Public Opinion that “[i]f you are using the argument from history, you are fairly certain to select those dates in the past which support your point of view of what should be done” [47] (p. 123). In 2001, for example, the Bush administration framed 9/11 as historical ‘ground zero’, thus implying that everything that happened before the attack was irrelevant and that a new history, as it were, started on that day [48] (p. 43).

The Glasgow University Media Group have shown in various publications [19,20,49] the struggle of narratives in the news, and how each side in a conflict is desperate to get across their points of view to the virtual exclusion of the other’s. By including or excluding certain historical narratives, media texts imply a certain nature and character of the problem. By, for instance, omitting the whole explanatory framework of Western military interventions in the discussion of various refugee crises, the issue gets discussed narrowly in terms of ‘economic migrants’ as well as in terms of security concerns, whereas the causes for the refugee movement are blended out or backgrounded [20,28]. This portrays refugees mostly in terms of the perceived negative impact they have on affected societies, and thus construes them more as a threat than as people worthy of empathy and support—unworthy victims.

For the Israel–Palestine conflict, Philo and Berry have shown that the selective use of historical context results in a simplistic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc (‘after this, therefore because of this’) understanding of who attacks and who retaliates and why: “The message on the news overall is that it is the Palestinians in Gaza who start the problem, that it is they who need to be disarmed, and that the Israelis respond but with terrible consequences for civilians. Because the Israeli account of cause is not challenged, the focus of criticism is on the manner in which the Israelis have conducted their ‘response’” [19] (p. 367). ‘It all started on 7 October’ is, in this respect, very similar in discursive terms to the construal of 9/11 as ‘ground zero’ discussed above. Depending on where the narrative starts, however, the Palestinians could be construed as responding to previous Israeli aggression and ongoing occupation as well. The difference this makes on the portrayal of victims, arguably, is that audiences will tend to have less empathy towards the side that is perceived as having instigated the violence.

3.5. Use of Framing

According to Entman, framing involves “select[ing] some aspects of a perceived reality and mak[ing] them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” [50] (p. 52). It revolves around “diagnos[ing], evaluat[ing] and prescrib[ing]” [ibid], meaning that through the frame, the audience is presented with a definition of or a label for the problem as well as with an evaluation of who/what is good or bad and finally, at least implicitly, with a suggestion of what is to be done. A well-known example comes from Entman’s own comparative analysis of US media coverage of two nearly identical incidents: the Soviet Union’s downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983 and the US Navy’s downing of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988. While the former was framed as a deliberate atrocity that emphasized Soviet cruelty and civilian innocence (one New York Times headline read “Murder in the Air”), the latter was largely framed as a tragic accident, with attention directed to the complexity of the situation rather than the victims (the New York Times titled “In Captain Roger’s Shoes”, trying to elicit sympathy for the US Navy Captain giving the orders to shoot). This contrast illustrates how framing not only guides moral evaluation but also determines whether victims are constructed as worthy of sympathy and outrage or as regrettable casualties of circumstance [51,52]. In a different study, Reese outlined the impact of framing on post-9/11 public discourse:

Patriotic post 9/11 television news graphics provided related shorthand frames, with ‘America strikes back’ mutating into ‘America’s new war’. Placing the issue primarily in the military realm privileges armed strength at the expense of the international political, diplomatic, and law enforcement areas, where conflicts may also be mediated. We are led to ask simply whether we will win, not whether we are in the right fight with the right strategy [53] (p. 23).

Additionally, as Iyengar shows, framing achieves an assignment of responsibility [54]. He found that when news stories focus on individual events or stories (episodic framing), rather than broader background reports (thematic framing), audiences arrive at more individualistic attributions of responsibility. For instance, in stories about poverty, when the focus was on one particular person or event, people were much more prone to see this person as responsible for their status than when the news story also included economic or social reasons that push people into poverty [54] (pp. 65–66). In another study, Correa-Chica et al. analyzed episodic and thematic framing of violence against social leaders and human rights defenders in the context of Colombia. They found, similarly, that by framing such events as individual occurrences and without embedding them into the broader context “there is a tendency to oversimplify the problem by not reporting on the political violence, the diverse leadership roles and struggles of [social leaders and human rights defenders], and the underlying causes and potential solutions to human rights violations” [55] (p. 396). Since news have a strong tendency for episodic framing [54] (p. 62), violence is frequently decontextualized and shown as a singular, unconnected occurrence. Therefore, the responsibility to end the violence lies with the individuals and not with, for example, systems of oppression that steadily produce such violence.

3.6. Use of Images

An equally important aspect of news reports are the images they use as representative visualizations of the story. Lippmann, in the early days of visual news reporting, said the following about pictures:

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture, requires an effort of memory before a picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you [47] (p. 81).

This means that images can evoke feelings that would be difficult, if not impossible to activate using only words [8] (p. 29). In media reports on victims, it follows that the use of pictures showing human suffering may lead to the activation of emotions in the audience. This is in particular because “[e]ye tracking studies show that people read very few news articles but do pay a lot of attention to the accompanying photographs” [56] (p. 9). Alongside headlines, images are hence the main framers of the story, and as such are worth analyzing.

Fishman maintains that “[w]hen reporting on international crises, the news media consider postmortem pictures to be ethically necessary because they promise the emotional provocation needed to inspire solutions” and that since “these pictures are believed to ‘incite a demand for justice and change,’ and ultimately save lives, their concealment risks the sin of omission” [56] (p. 203). Thus, pictures are meant to move the audience towards an emotional reaction, pushing them to demand politicians to act, similar to Chouliaraki’s claim [13] (p. 6). Their purpose would consequently be to render people suffering from violence as ‘worthy’ of our compassion. While the above quote by Fishman seems to insinuate otherwise, media images of suffering, too, show a hierarchy of victims.

In a study on visual representation of refugees in the Australian news media, Bleiker et al. identified a “pattern of anonymous masses [that] is further reinforced through the consistent visual presence of boats. The category of image that is most likely to create compassion and empathy in viewers—photographs of individual refugees with clearly recognisable facial features—made up a remarkably low 2 per cent of all images. Almost half of all images displayed no visual features at all” [57] (p. 413). This, they argue, causes the refugee issue to be “seen not as a humanitarian disaster that requires a compassionate public response, but rather as a potential threat that sets in place mechanisms of security and border control” [57] (p. 399).

Romano and Porto came to similar conclusions regarding the portrayal of refugees in Spanish and British newspapers in which they were “represented in photographs and texts as an anonymous vast crowd advancing towards European countries,” with only few showing “the individualization of refugees and their feelings” [58] (p. 169). In other words, refugees are frequently visually represented as a threat and their suffering is not shown, making them unworthy victims.

An example of the visual representation of a worthy victim is the case of Aslan Kurdi, a 3-year-old child fleeing the war in Syria, whose dead body washed up on the shores of Turkey in 2015. In their analysis of what became an iconic picture, Hellmueller and Zhang show that the publishing of the photo of the dead boy lying face down in the sand led to a much more “humanized visual framing” of refugees in some media outlets [59] (p. 1), emphasizing the power of pictures on public discourse.

Overall, there is a tendency for worthy victims to be represented with close-up shots that make their suffering visible for the audience, while unworthy victims might receive wide-angle shots that show the destruction rather than the human tragedy. Fahmy illustrated how, after 9/11, the Arabic language newspaper Al-Hayat focused on pictures showing the planes flying into the World Trade Center and the following destruction, but deemphasized the human suffering; conversely, the International Herald Tribune did the opposite and showed pictures that humanized the victims and their families. The reverse was true of their respective coverage of the subsequent US war on Afghanistan. The choice of pictures, therefore, will likely lead the audience to focus more on the destruction or more on the suffering and thus elicit a different level of emotional response [60] (p. 150).

4. Conclusions

Victimhood in the context of conflict can be portrayed in manifold ways and to very different effects in the news media. The choice of sources who get to frame the story and therefore decide who gets media attention is one aspect to take into account. Another revolves around the use of evaluative terms—often those used by news sources and naturalized by the media—to suggest a judgment to the audience: who is good and who is bad; which actions or outcomes are desirable or undesirable; and by extension, which victims deserve empathy and which violence requires condemnation. Besides spin words, the choice to include or omit agency through processes such as passivization or nominalization can also add to whether or not suffering people are perceived as victims of directed violence or merely as unfortunate bystanders to an agentless but deadly event. Personal and historical context can also trigger empathy towards victims of violence. When we know the victims’ names, their families, their dreams, we are much more likely to see them as full-fledged human beings. Likewise, when the violence is embedded in historical context, this suggests to the audience a guilty party by virtue of cause and effect; it therefore implies responsibility for the act of violence. The way a story is framed, for instance as terrorism rather than liberation struggle, also impacts the way audiences understand a story. If a mass casualty event is framed in the context of a war on terror, audiences are less likely to see the victims of said event as worthy. Finally, images can also contribute to how audiences connect to victimized people. Wide-angle shots focusing on large groups of faceless people or on physical destruction are less prone to elicit feelings of empathy than a close shot on the facial expression of a suffering child.

Taken together, all these factors determine how media audiences will make sense of violence in terms of how they will label it (e.g., terror vs. self-defense), how they will evaluate it and what they think ought to be done about it and by who. But on a more fundamental level, they help determine the place victims are permitted to occupy in the ‘hierarchy of victims’, and the amount of empathy they are seen as deserving. The assignment of worthiness by the media is not based on the qualitative differences in suffering between the victims, but as Herman and Chomsky have shown, only on the value they hold or the danger they pose to people in power. In that sense, it is important to note that media biases operate in multiple directions and depend on context. Thus, western media serve here as an illustrative case, not the sole exemplar, of broader discursive processes. Accordingly, the question of who is afforded the label of ‘worthy’ or of ‘unworthy’ victim can vary greatly, but these concepts are real and call for scrutiny. This is why deconstructing the representation of victimhood in war reporting is a worthwhile and important practice, so as to avoid what Bayoumi emphasized as the inevitable implication of such biased coverage in western media: “war is natural for people of color, while white people naturally gravitate towards peace” [22] (online).