“The world’s worst humanitarian crisis you’ve never heard of.”
“The deadliest conflict of our time.”
“The most neglected emergency on the planet.”
All too often, the global conversation around crisis coverage feels like a macabre race to the bottom – a struggle over who has it worst, with the unspoken assumption that the greater the suffering, the more deserving the attention. It is a grim calculus that pits victims against one another, rewarding volume and violence over context and consequence.
We are seeing this unfold in real time. For months, global headlines were dominated by the mass atrocities in Gaza. Before that, the war in Ukraine monopolised front pages and news cycles. Now, attention is beginning to shift to Sudan, particularly to the horrors unfolding in El Fasher. These are among the crises that have managed to break through onto the global media stage – at least for a moment. But is that because they are inherently more deserving of coverage than others?
The fact is that this crisis roulette – with a single emergency or disaster dominating global attention at any one time – is not necessarily driven by the needs of the impacted communities. Research into news values indicates that decisions around newsworthiness often reflect the expectations, needs, perspectives and interests of journalists, the media establishments that employ them, and the societies they belong to. Such research, however, tends to take a rear-view mirror perspective of editorial decision-making, trying to divine the common factors that impact publishing outcomes.
But rather than inquiring into why a particular event was covered, what if we asked what should be covered? In that case, news values would be focused less on news and more on values. Rather than seeing newsworthiness as an almost automatic journalistic response to internal and external stimuli (cultural proximity, unexpectedness, drama, timeliness, etc), it would be the result of a deliberately selective process reflecting the primacy of ethical consideration.
Journalists often say they cannot be expected to cover everything. And they are right. Selectivity is inevitable. Newsrooms have limited resources. Audiences have limited attention. The question is therefore not whether to be selective, but on what ethical basis selection is made, especially when it comes to events that involve human suffering on a large scale. Too often, that basis goes unquestioned.
That failure to interrogate the ethical basis of news selection decisions has serious real-life consequences. When applied to humanitarian crises, traditional news values often tend to reinforce a colonial hierarchy of suffering. Dramatic deaths in Paris make headlines. Protracted starvation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo does not. As the book Humanitarian Journalists: Covering Crises From A Boundary Zone notes, “acute disparities in media attention reproduce a ‘hierarchy of human life’ in which some people’s lives are represented as more worthy of attention than others, which ultimately helps to fuel prejudice and injustices”.
But if selectivity in coverage is unavoidable, won’t there always be disparities in coverage and thus implied hierarchies of life and suffering? What happens to the principle of moral equivalency – “the idea that all lives have equal worth”, according to the book – if we must inevitably choose whose suffering to highlight?
The interconnectedness of crises
Themrise Khan, in an insightful LinkedIn post, says it’s not really about choosing which lives matter. Humanitarian crises, she argues, should not be seen in isolation: “Sudan – and others like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine etc. – are all part of the same ecosystem of settler colonial violence and ethnic extermination. You cannot speak of one while reserving to speak of the other on a separate occasion. They aren't separate 'topics'. They are all interrelated. And that is the only way we can address them if we want to resolve anything... This isn’t how we will resolve some of the most violent conflicts of contemporary times — by setting them apart from one another and making them beg for our attention.”
The situation is analogous to that faced by journalists when reporting on any issue impacting huge numbers of people. They couldn’t possibly interview everybody and reproduce their individual stories. They can only highlight a few out of countless experiences. No one would argue that they are necessarily presenting some lives as more precious than others by doing so, since it is understood that the sample is meant to represent the whole, not stand apart from it. Similarly, Themrise reminds us to consider coverage of crises at a global level as a sampling of the whole. And the same ethical obligations impacting who journalists choose to speak to and whose experiences they choose to highlight will impact media decisions about which crises to cover.
If we are to build a more ethical model of humanitarian coverage, we must learn to prioritise without dehumanising, to allocate attention without reinforcing a hierarchy of suffering.
This call to see crises as interconnected – as symptoms of the same underlying political and structural violence – is a necessary corrective to the compartmentalised logic of international coverage. Media cycles tend to treat each crisis as a standalone story, often devoid of history, context, or connection. But a more ethical journalism would recognise that Gaza and El Fasher are not just back-to-back atrocities on the same timeline, but expressions of shared global systems of militarism, extraction, racism, and impunity. Understanding them as part of the same ecosystem doesn’t diminish their uniqueness. It rather deepens our understanding of their roots and the global order that sustains them.
Therefore, if we are to build a more ethical model of humanitarian coverage, we must learn to prioritise without dehumanising, to allocate attention without reinforcing a hierarchy of suffering. And that requires developing an ethical rationale for picking which crises to focus on. Such a rationale should be based on the ethical obligations that media and journalists (and indeed all people communicating about a crisis, including personnel at humanitarian agencies, academics, and researchers) owe to the millions whose stories they tell.
In this column, I have previously argued that in the context of suffering, impartiality or neutrality is deeply unethical; that journalists have moral obligations to report in ways that help the suffering to end, and that allow the full humanity of distant sufferers to be seen and acknowledged. Understanding crises as manifestations of a wider system means reporting should seek ways to uncover the abuses in that system; and exert pressure to overthrow that system or force those responsible for it to reform it. All these considerations should be taken into account when editors are deciding where it is best to deploy limited resources and which crises help them achieve that.
What is real impact?
This tension also intersects with broader shifts in the journalism field itself, particularly the growing emphasis on impact which is today increasingly seen as a central measure of a story’s value. Foundations, newsrooms, and editorial boards alike speak of journalism that “makes a difference”, that “moves the needle”, or that “influences change”. In the context of crises, this should not be narrowly understood as only limited to what assists people in a particular crisis – though we absolutely must not lose sight of that – but also what leads to system-wide disruption.
This conversation is not only for journalists. Humanitarian organisations, whose press releases often drive coverage, are deeply entangled in the same dynamics. In the competition for attention and funding, they also routinely pit victims of different crises against each other in a marketplace of suffering.
For me, an instructive way to think about this comes from the 2016 film Spotlight, which follows The Boston Globe's investigation into the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests in the US city of Boston. In one scene, as the team debates whether to publish findings involving 50 priests, editor Marty Baron argues against stories “which made a lot of noise but changed things not one bit”. He insists the team should go after what is consequential – the story that shakes up structures of power: “We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priests.”
For journalism in humanitarian crises, the same principle could apply. Rather than chasing whatever is most visible or dramatic, media organisations could prioritise crises with the greatest potential to move the institutional needle. This means being guided by a well-defined notion of what impact they want their coverage to have. Not every story will change global policy or rewire donor priorities. But selecting stories with an eye to their capacity to expose systems, galvanise solidarity, or force accountability ensures that limited resources are directed where they are most likely to matter.
As noted earlier, this conversation is not only for journalists. Humanitarian organisations, whose press releases often drive coverage, are deeply entangled in the same dynamics. In the competition for attention and funding, they also routinely pit victims of different crises against each other in a marketplace of suffering. It encourages media outlets to treat attention as a prize to be won by whoever screams loudest, not by those who suffer most or who need urgent visibility. It also undermines the dignity of the people affected, who become reduced to rhetorical props.
In the end, this is a question of justice. In a world where attention shapes funding, policy, and public memory, deciding what to cover is never neutral. Selective coverage is not inherently unethical. But silence, when structured by power and prejudice, can be. Ethical journalism means not just reporting well, but choosing what to report based on principled reflection, not merely professional habit or public appetite. It means asking hard questions about the moral logic of our attention economy.
Please send thoughts and critiques to [email protected].
Drawing on The New Humanitarian’s three decades of experience covering communities impacted by wars and disasters, as well as international responses to them, this video highlights the ethical questions journalists must confront when telling stories about situations of widespread human suffering:
