The Law of Proximity and War Reporting in Ukraine

The intense media coverage of the Ukraine war started warping into something else just 19 days after the start of hostilities, and one French radio presenter called out his journalist colleagues. Radio station Europe 1 team newscaster Bruno Donnet described two news reports that painted the World under vastly different journalistic priorities.

Donnet noted that Paris-based media organization France2 headed their daily coverage of March 14th, 2022 with an on-the-scene report from the Poland-Ukraine border. A heavily-coated journalist gave a field report among sandbags, camouflage nets and anti-tank traps.

Rival news agency TF1 however led with a very different focus: “This evening we start with the liter of gasoline that has crossed the price level of….” The report went on to describe not the lines of Russian tanks, not the lines of refugees waiting to cross the border from Ukraine to Poland, but instead the lines of Parisians lining up their cars at the gasoline stations to fill their gas tanks. It is now the inconvenienced residents of the City of Lights who are painted as victims.

Donnet asserts that even in wartime, news reporting cannot resist what he called the “sacro sainte loi de la proximite maximale” or the “sacrosanct law of maximal proximity,” which dictates that the hundreds of dead and thousands of refugees on the Ukrainian-Polish frontier have been relegated in less than 18 days to a background story on fueling a Peugeot.

Even the presidential campaign that pitted incumbent Emmanuel Macron against a range of challengers saw the price of fuel command attention as a major debate topic. Communist candidate Fabien Roussel used some of his debate time to claim rising gasoline prices were a form of extortion, claiming theatrically in French “The gas station is the only place where you hold the “pistol” (nozzle) and you [are the one who gets] robbed.” He made a quip about jerry cans that store gasoline, not in the context of supplying Ukraine’s army, but in saying the prices in France are so high that people should start getting jerry cans with the Chanel logo on them.

Therein lies the nutshell dynamic of Maximal Proximity: a shift from Ukraine being subjected to Russian territorial expansion and occupation, to Parisian commuters feeling they are being extorted by market forces, even though commuter trains are available in France’s capital.

And it only gets worse from there. Western press can frequently be seen assigning a hierarchy of effort and coverage of human lives based not only on the distance from the audience, but also the ‘racial distance’ of the victim, which some analysts refer to as “the hierarchy of death.”

Race becomes one of the lines defining the paradigm of Proximity. The four ethical boundaries are: geography; temporal space; effect; and socio-professional character. The last one can be phrased more easily with the question “Are the victims rich and light-skinned, or poor and dark?”

As journalism critic Roy Greenslade wrote more than a decade ago, with the war in Iraq raging, “foreign deaths always rank below domestic deaths. Similarly, on the basis that all news is local, deaths at home provide human interest stories that people want to know about, while the deaths of foreigners are merely statistics.”

Tunisian screenwriter and director Hatem Belhaj writes in French that there is a rough formula of ‘kilometric death” consisting of race multiplied by number and distance, yielding his conclusion that “un voisin qui meurt a plus d’impact que cents persones qui meurent a cent kilometers et encore plus d’impact que mille victims a mille kilometers.” – one neighbor who dies has more impact than hundreds who die at a hundred kilometers distance, and even more impact than a thousand victims at a thousand kilometers.

Case in point: Search parties amassed a fleet of 14 aircraft in 2007 to engage in the weeks-long search for millionaire aviator and male Caucasian Steve Fossett when he disappeared over the California desert. But disappearances at sea of inflatable rafts with hundreds of African refugees hardly make the news for an afternoon …if they are reported at all.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) released a report on the phenomenon of “invisible shipwrecks” – migrant ships or inflatable boats that have disappeared in the middle of a dangerous ocean passage, far from any news cameras or microphones. According to the IOM: “migrant deaths tend to be underreported or sometimes unrecorded.”

An IOM study from 2014 to 2019 reported the staggering news that 30,602 human beings have died trying to reach a country of refuge – enough to fill each seat in Toronto’s BMO Stadium with a corpse.
Just counting the figures for 2020, the number of migrants who died at sea trying to reach European shores surpassed some 1,700 migrants lost.

Just counting lives lost in 2020 trying to reach European territory, more than 1,700 migrants died before reaching safe shores.
If each of their lives received the same proportionate search attention as Steve Fossett, there would be over 24,000 aircraft searching for them.

Borders were opened in early 2022 for thousands of predominantly white refugees from Ukraine, but the doors were not so welcoming in 2019 when the Italy-bound rescue vessel Ocean Viking was blocked by Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini from disembarking 121 starving black African refugees, including 32 children.

Even actor Richard Gere jumped into the fray, boarding the ship and calling out the hypocrisy of EU human rights legislation, while enraged social media commenters told Gere that he should house the boatloads of refugees in his home.

Two years later in the Spring of 2021, the same vessel Ocean Viking responded to a call of a large inflatable raft with 130 on board capsized in the Mediterranean. The crew of the Viking arrived to find more than 10 bodies floating in the water. No survivors. And no fleet of 14 aircraft running a weeks-long search grid as with Steve Fossett.

A statement from the group SOS Mediterranee said: “States abandon their responsibility to coordinate search and rescue operations, leaving private actors and civil society to fill the deadly void they leave behind. We can see the result of this deliberate inaction in the sea around our ship.”

Just on May 8th, 2022, Le Monde released a scandalous report that the E.U. Border and Coast Guard Agency, known as FrontEx, has been accepting thousands of Ukrainian refugees into E.U. borders, while at the same time secretly rounding up landed Asian and African refugees on Greek islands such as Lesvos and Chios, putting them into rafts, and setting them back into the Aegean Sea to float into Turkish waters – a violation of their legally upheld right to asylum application in the E.U.; a violation of maritime safety; and a fraudulent false documentation of their “prevention of arrival” status on the paperwork. As the ‘pushback’ scandal broke, the FrontEx director, Fabrice Leggeri, tendered his resignation.

The reasons why one group of people in need of protection can receive blanket coverage for days while another is barely mentioned can go beyond proximity and race, overlapping into (or perhaps bleeding into) other more practical factors.

One key decider is the ability or inability of news crews to reach the scene to provide live footage.

And another is the cynical self-censorship: editors and producers know that viewers will pay more attention to events happening to their own people in their own country than tragedies unfolding in other countries to “other” people. The cruel calculation is not written by the editors; but by the audience.

The Law of Proximity during the Ukraine War, happening simultaneously with a Mediterranean refugee crisis and a commodity crisis, will dictate the priorities of societies in valuing the subjective, cynical scale of tragedy. Most important is the price of gas in first-world capitals. Second is the war in Caucasian-populated Ukraine. And third is the tragedy of dark-skinned non-Europeans disappearing under the salt water waves of the Mediterranean.

Referring to the choice of covering Parisian fuel prices over refugee flows, accepting fair-skinned Caucasian refugees over dark ones, and reporting on disappeared millionaires while ignoring stadium numbers of poor people stranded at sea, Radio journalist Donnet concludes his analysis of news priorities with a quote from Jean Paul Sartre: “nous sommes nos choix” – we are our choices.