Did you hear? Artsakh, an Armenian-majority republic which is formally in Azerbaijan, has just declared itself defunct, with all state institutions dissolved on New Year’s day in 2024. This means that on that date, Artsakh will go from just formally in Azerbaijan to really in Azerbaijan. There is an ongoing mass exodus of Armenians from Artsakh, fearing the Azerbaijanis and their track record with Armenians and not wanting to stick around to find out anyways. 

…

What?

…

By this point, most of you all reading are probably blankly staring at your screen. What is this man yapping about?

But what if I asked you about Ukraine?

It depends on how much you follow current events, but just about everyone has heard about the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started in 2022. During the first days of the invasion, live news about it was plastered everywhere, it seemed every Western celebrity in existence was issuing condemnations and opinions, and if you did as much as check your phone, computer, or TV, you would probably see news about it. People of all cultural backgrounds and affiliations stood together to condemn Russia and offer sympathy and aid to Ukraine, and all Western nations were dropping sanction after sanction on Russia and offering Ukraine military and humanitarian aid. 

But herein lies the problem.

To be clear, I am not discounting how horrific the situation in Ukraine is. It deserves outrage, there is no question. However, there are far too many things in the world, far too many horrific, atrocious events in the world that don’t get the outrage they deserve, because the press doesn’t report on them.

One of the most integral foundations of a democracy is a free press, beholden to no one, informing the populace, and exposing governmental excesses. And despite the insistence of both sides of the aisle to the opposite, by and large, we have a free press here in the U.S. News outlets like Fox or CNN, widely considered to be slanted to one side, have published articles critical to “their” side before, and there are very strong laws here in the U.S protecting journalists and freedom of the press. 

If this is true though, how come so many more people know what is going on in Ukraine than Armenia?

The U.S, and most democratic countries around the world, have strict laws in place saying that you cannot tamper with what is being written, and that any opinions can be expressed. By and large, this is obeyed. However, there are no laws about what media can be promoted, and so this is the way that almost all media outlets control the narrative. The piece about the conflict in Artsakh will be written, but it will be buried by news about the latest outrage about Trump, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or how the other side wants to destroy America. The piece about Ukraine will rise straight to the top, live news about it will abound, and every political pundit will talk about it and demand action from their politicians. 

This is how tragedies in the U.S that happened decades ago are still talked about, while tragedies in other parts of the world, especially in non-Western countries, much larger in scale, and much more recently, are hushed up. If you don’t know what happened on the morning of September 11, 2001, I would be impressed, and I’d be dying to know what rock you live under. Yet if I asked a random person on the street about the terrorist attacks of Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria, I would be impressed if you didn’t think I was a crazy lunatic who spends too much time on Wikipedia, even though the collective death toll of Boko Haram’s attacks are similar, if not even higher, than the death toll of 9/11. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had people lining up to donate to disaster relief to help New Orleans, but Storm Daniel in Libya, which caused much more damage, killed magnitudes more people, and happened a month ago, barely merits a passing mention in the news. It is a shame that we do not do more to help stop these attacks, that whenever tragedies happen outside the Western world we do not care, because we do not even know.

So the how has been established. But what about the why?

In this age of the internet, the vast majority of news is spread online on news websites, which are either accessed with subscriptions or are paid for using ad revenue. Most news agencies in the U.S are private and for-profit, meaning that they want the maximum amount of clicks or subscriptions possible, to generate the maximum amount of money. To do this, media sites publish stories filled with outrage and tribalism, scientifically proven to generate views and clicks. This then promotes loyalty to that particular media site, as by pushing outrageous, tribalistic narratives, we feel like we’re in a team, a small flicker of reason in this cesspool of nonsense. We keep coming back, generating ad revenue, or convincing the person to subscribe, all making the media company more money. 

Crucially, however, outrage only works if the people getting outraged are invested, if they care. The media only promotes stories about the West, and specifically stories affecting the U.S, because that is all they think we care about. 

At first, it might seem like there is an obvious solution, to just make the media public so they are not beholden to the whims of the market and profits. Once you think more about it, however, this is an equally bad solution. Public media is beholden to the whims of their donors and/or the government, so they are still beholden to interests, just indirectly, instead of directly. This whole issue is kind of like the classic chicken-and-egg problem. There is no easy solution, as the general populace can only know if the media promotes it, and the media can only promote it if they think that we care. The government can pass laws mandating neutral and broad coverage of world events, but without a profit incentive, news agencies will just find loopholes to promote U.S centric content. Rather, the greatest responsibility lies in us. As citizens, we have to show that we care about other nations, that we care about the horrific atrocities in Artsakh, Ukraine, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia. We have to show that we are outraged, that we will not stand idly by. Because if we only care about the lives of people who look like us, or talk like us, or have similar culture to us, then we are no better than our forefathers.