Why Media Matters Most in Times of Conflict
How humanizing the other has changed our national conversations
I have a joke/not joke I like to say about how every piece of popular media up until like 2007 revolved around a mediocre white guy or the woman he murdered.
Obviously, this is very much hyperbole. Great stories about all sorts of people have always been told, even if they didn’t reach mass audiences. And some of those great stories did break through to change the hearts and minds of those who read them.
But today I was meant to write a nice little review of Beckham — another piece about an admittedly above-mediocre white guy. All jokes aside, it just didn’t sit right with me to first dive into the frivolous while the world feels so much like a tinder box. I wanted to step away from the media of our past and think about the media of our present.
The conflict today in Israel and Gaza is being witnessed by a nation that has been shaped irrevocably by the proliferation of stories from outside of our own experience. With the advent of social media and the proliferation of streaming services, more and more audiences are accessing the voices of those who have less power and have less often been represented in the stories that grab our national attention.
I am not a foreign policy expert. I do not have a solution to this conflict and I am not here to propose one. My aim in this piece is only to analyze why we’re even asking the question about Palestinian sovereignty now, when in previous conflicts that narrative has been nearly silent, or even seen as dangerously subversive among American mainstream politics.
The power of stories has always been to grab our imagination and transport us into somebody else’s shoes. Repeated trips on these journeys to another psyche is a repeated practice in empathy-building. Traditionally, the limited scope of the stories that reached us narrowed the window of who we were primed to empathize with and relate to fully.
But, thankfully a generation of people have now experienced what it’s like to access the hopes, dreams, fears, daily lives, and mundane realities of more than just one type of person. More stories from every class, country, sexuality, gender, etc. means that empathy muscle has grown strong in those of us who have spent our lives immersed in media about people who aren’t like us.
We can only condone the hurt of another person if we believe that person to be not as real as we are ourselves. Their emotions cannot be experienced like our emotions are experienced. Their hopes cannot be as important as our hopes. Dehumanization through propaganda has always sought to wear away at the humanity of the other. Because if we were to truly see that other as an extension of or reflection of ourselves, then we would understand their pain too thoroughly to let it proceed.
Media today is a mass tangle of niche sites and traditional news outlets and social media. For all of the algorithmic faults honing many in on a single viewpoint, those who are curious about the world can today find more stories than ever before as a result of this new media landscape.
And there are more and more people for whom that curiosity is a driving force. Traditional ideas of crime, of war, of what it is to be human, are all being challenged by the softening of the line between us and them. The narratives are more complicated. The viewpoints are more nuanced.
Yet humanity has our lines in the sand. We cannot condone intentional infliction of pain. We cannot condone innocent lives being taken or broken. We cannot condone murder as a means of attention-grabbing. And this is where the conflict in Israel and Gaza has suddenly become a national conversation unlike any we’ve experienced in our history of support for the Israeli state.
Nationally we are coming to terms with our colonial past, with the harms that we have wrought globally with our policies supporting capital above all else. The stories of the oppressed now sit beside the stories of the oppressors and offer us a chance to understand how humanity was pushed aside in the pursuit of wealth. Naturally this introspection has led us to question the logic of colonialism everywhere. Perhaps we too zealously want others to atone for our sins. Perhaps we are the children of the oppressors washed up on America’s shores.
But more than anything I believe that a generation of empathizers is leading a national conversation with room to hold to account both the brutality of murdering Israelis and the brutality of continuing an attack when Palestinian civilians cannot flee. Many of us have come to see the world as a place where there is not an us/them. There is humanity on both sides of every conflict and we do ourselves harm to pretend otherwise.
Perhaps this is naïve. But in times of crisis, the instinct to dehumanize has been the root of so many evils. To live in a day where the screams of the brutalized on both sides of a war can reach the ears of civilians an ocean away changes the moral calculus of a nation. Media has changed the way we view our world. Stories have made us unable to turn away from the suffering of people we know better today than we ever knew in the past.
Whereas before we were forced to guess at the desires of those most affected or stuck with secondhand filtration of their words, today we can hear directly from those who are losing loved ones. Their competing desires are messy and heartbreaking and confusing. But, I think as a nation who finances so much of the armed conflict in the world, we owe it to those people to keep listening and amplifying their pleas.
Media at its best is a window that helps us see the world more clearly and compassionately. In a time where chaos feels like it’s closing in, that clear vision is more important than ever. We are able to make our most morally honest decisions when we are able to see the humanity of those involved most clearly.
We have windows into the world being shaped by our national conversation. What we need is the strength to keep listening, and the courage to make our decisions based on the humanity of everyone involved.