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Scherling, J. Representations of Victimhood in Media Reporting of Armed Conflicts. Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/59574 (accessed on 10 May 2026).
Scherling J. Representations of Victimhood in Media Reporting of Armed Conflicts. Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/59574. Accessed May 10, 2026.
Scherling, Johannes. "Representations of Victimhood in Media Reporting of Armed Conflicts" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/59574 (accessed May 10, 2026).
Scherling, J. (2026, March 03). Representations of Victimhood in Media Reporting of Armed Conflicts. In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/59574
Scherling, Johannes. "Representations of Victimhood in Media Reporting of Armed Conflicts." Encyclopedia. Web. 03 March, 2026.
Peer Reviewed
Representations of Victimhood in Media Reporting of Armed Conflicts
This is a peer-reviewed entry published in Encyclopedia Journal, full entry can be found at 10.3390/encyclopedia6030054

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.

victimhood representation worthy and unworthy victims media framing news discourse hierarchy of victimization empathy in journalism critical media analysis
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].

References

  1. Hall, S.; Evans, J.; Nixon, S. (Eds.) Representation, 2nd ed.; SAGE Publications Ltd.: London, UK, 2013.
  2. Goatly, A. Critical Reading and Writing; Routledge: London, UK, 2000.
  3. Herman, E.; Chomsky, N. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media; Pantheon Books: New York, NY, USA, 2002.
  4. Elejalde, E.; Ferres, L.; Herder, E. On the nature of real and perceived bias in the mainstream media. PLoS ONE 2018, 13, e0193765.
  5. Galtung, J.; Ruge, M.H. The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers. J. Peace Res. 1965, 2, 64–90.
  6. Cook, T.E. Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution, 2nd ed.; The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, USA, 2005.
  7. Tuchman, G. Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity. Am. J. Sociol. 1972, 77, 660–679.
  8. Greer, C. News Media, Victims and Crime. In Victims, Crime and Society: An Introduction, 2nd ed.; Davies, P., Francis, P., Greer, C., Eds.; Sage: London, UK, 2017; pp. 20–49.
  9. Christie, N. The Ideal Victim. In From Crime Policy to Victim Policy; Fattah, E.A., Ed.; Palgrave Macmillian: London, UK, 1986; pp. 17–30.
  10. Lewis, J.A.; Hamilton, J.C.; Elmore, J.D. Describing the ideal victim: A linguistic analysis of victim descriptions. Curr. Psychol. 2021, 40, 4324–4332.
  11. McCloskey, S. The War in Ukraine Has Revealed a Hierarchy of Victims. Policy Pract. Dev. Educ. Rev. 2022, 34, 138–149.
  12. Entman, R.M.; Rojecki, A. The Black Image in the White Mind; The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, USA, 2000.
  13. Chouliaraki, L. The Spectatorship of Suffering; Sage Publications: London, UK, 2016.
  14. Ginosar, A.; Cohen, I. Patriotic journalism: An appeal to emotion and cognition. Media War Confl. 2019, 12, 3–18.
  15. Springer, N.; Nygren, G.; Widholm, A.; Orlova, D.; Taradai, D. Narrating “Their War” and “Our War”—The Patriotic Journalism Paradigm in the Context of Swedish and Ukrainian Conflict Coverage. Cent. Eur. J. Commun. 2022, 2, 178–201.
  16. Mueller, J.E. Presidential popularity from Truman to Johnson. Am. Political Sci. Rev. 1970, 64, 18–34.
  17. Boyd-Barrett, O.; Rantanen, T. The Globalization of News; SAGE Publications Ltd.: London, UK, 1998.
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