The Hierarchy of Suffering: Who Decides Which Wars the World Gets to See

There is a war happening right now that has killed, by conservative estimates, somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000 people. Twelve million have been displaced. Twenty-five million face hunger. Rape is being used as a systematic weapon of war. The country's capital, a city that once housed nearly eight million people, has been reduced to rubble.

You may not know much about it.

It is Sudan. It began in April 2023. And by every measurable metric of human catastrophe, it is the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth right now. Tom Perriello, who served as U.S. special envoy to Sudan under the Biden administration, said he had never seen "as big of a disconnect between the scale of a crisis and the scale of media coverage" in his life. A New York Times op-ed in late 2023 was headlined plainly: "The War the World Forgot."

Meanwhile, a London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine study found that in Khartoum State alone, over 61,000 people died in the first fourteen months of fighting, more than three times the UN's own estimate for the entire country. Over 90% of those deaths went unrecorded. The country's infrastructure for documenting its own suffering had collapsed along with everything else.

This is not simply a failure of logistics. It is a failure of will, systemic, political, and deeply strategic. And it raises a question that deserves a real answer: who decides which wars the world gets to see, and what do they gain from the ones we don't?

The Architecture of Selective Grief

To understand why certain conflicts dominate global consciousness while others burn invisibly, you have to understand something fundamental about how major media institutions work: they do not operate in a vacuum. They operate within ecosystems of political interest, advertiser pressure, audience assumption, and ownership.

The BBC, often held as a gold standard of impartial reporting, was studied by the Centre for Media Monitoring over 12 months across more than 35,000 pieces of content covering the Israel-Gaza war. The findings were damning. Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians being killed at a ratio of 34 to 1. Emotive language, words like "brutal," "atrocities," "slaughter," "barbaric"- was used four times more frequently when describing Israeli victims. The word "massacre" was applied selectively. The phrase "genocide" was consistently shut down.

This is not one bad editorial decision. This is architecture.

In the United States, studies stretching back to the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s consistently revealed the same bias: a propensity to emphasise Israeli deaths, to frame Palestinian narratives as secondary, to default to official Israeli sources. In November 2023, over 750 journalists signed an open letter alleging anti-Palestinian bias in American newsrooms. The complaint wasn't coming from outside critics. It was coming from inside the building.

But here's where the conversation needs to get more honest and more uncomfortable: the Israel-Palestine conflict, for all its distorted coverage, is at least covered. What about the wars that get nothing essentially?

The Forgotten Math

In Xinjiang, China, credible evidence, including leaked government documents, survivor testimony, and satellite imagery, points to the systematic mass detention of over a million Uyghur Muslims, forced sterilisation, destruction of mosques, and what the United States Congress has formally termed genocide. Access to the region is tightly controlled. Journalists cannot travel freely. Uyghurs who speak to foreign reporters by phone risk punishment. When China hosted a global media summit in Xinjiang in October 2024, bringing in executives from Reuters and the Associated Press, Chinese officials used the platform to call all Western reporting on Uyghur persecution "fabricated lies." And crucially, China accounts for 60% of global rare-earth mineral sales and remains a top trading partner for over 120 countries. Speaking too loudly costs money. So the world speaks softly.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, an armed conflict that has simmered since the 1990s has produced what UN agencies consider the world's largest internal displacement crisis. In Myanmar, the Rohingya genocide drew brief flashes of attention before disappearing from front pages entirely. In Ethiopia's Tigray region, a war that may have killed half a million people between 2020 and 2022, including through deliberate starvation, received a fraction of the coverage given to conflicts where Western governments had direct military stakes.

The pattern is not random. The geography of attention in global media follows the geometry of power.

The Framework: Five Filters That Decide Your Suffering

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman articulated the "propaganda model" of media in 1988, the idea that media institutions filter news through ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and dominant ideology. Decades later, this framework looks less like a theory and more like a user manual.

Filter One: Geopolitical Proximity. Western media covers conflicts where Western governments are invested. Ukraine received extraordinary coverage, sympathetic, granular, emotionally rich, because NATO members were supplying weapons, because European borders felt threatened, because the visual proximity (a modern European country under bombardment) triggered identification in Western audiences. A Reuters journalist covering Lebanon and the Middle East noted the explicit double standard: reporters embedded with Ukrainian troops captured their drone strikes with "a lot of support and empathy." He asked, pointedly, whether CNN would ever embed with Palestinian resistance fighters the same way. Everyone knew the answer.

Filter Two: Economic Stakes. Where there is oil, gas, rare earth minerals, shipping lanes, or investment portfolios, there is coverage. The Middle East commands attention not just for its human suffering but because it sits atop the world's most critical energy infrastructure. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of global oil passes, is a few hundred kilometres from Iran. Every Israeli airstrike, every Houthi maritime attack, every Iranian proxy escalation is live content because it moves commodity prices. Sudan has gold, oil, and agricultural land, but those resources are being extracted largely by Chinese and Gulf interests, not Western ones. There is no constituency of Western shareholders anxious about their Sudanese investments filing into editorial meetings.

Filter Three: The Military-Industrial Media Complex. This deserves its own reckoning. The phrase "military-industrial complex" was coined by President Eisenhower in 1961 as a warning. Six decades later, it has evolved into something he might not have imagined: a military-industrial-media complex in which defence contractors, their political sponsors, and the media institutions that carry their advertising are all deeply intertwined. U.S. defence spending hit $886 billion in fiscal year 2023. The Big Five military contractors, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics, are backed by Wall Street asset managers including BlackRock and Vanguard. In 2023-2024, amid the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon shares climbed 18–20%, outpacing the S&P 500. For these entities, war is not a tragedy. It is a revenue cycle. And media outlets that carry their advertising, or are owned by conglomerates with defence investment stakes, are not structurally incentivised to question whether those wars should be fought, prolonged, or escalated.

Filter Four: The Journalism Access Problem. This is the one that gets discussed least, and it matters enormously. Sudan's war has been radically underreported, partly because it is extraordinarily difficult to cover. Internet blackouts rendered monitoring nearly impossible. Journalists face arrest, injury, and death. At least 32 Sudanese journalists have been killed in the current conflict. When foreign journalists did gain access, it was largely by embedding with the Sudanese military, which controlled what they could see. The conflict, therefore, entered global consciousness filtered through the very parties perpetuating it. Compare this to Israel-Gaza, where, despite unprecedented danger to journalists (Gaza is now on record as the deadliest conflict ever for media workers, with over 260 killed since October 2023), there is still a concentrated global press corps, diplomatic infrastructure, and international legal attention that keeps the story alive.

Filter Five: The Audience Assumption. There is something uglier underneath all of this, and media executives know it even if they rarely say it: audiences are assumed to care more about some lives than others. The assumption is coded, often racially, always politically. Coverage of Ukraine explicitly described the shock of seeing "civilised people" and "people like us" under fire, language that went largely uncontested even as it implied that Sudanese, Yemeni, or Congolese lives were less recognisably human. This assumption feeds itself. Less coverage creates less audience familiarity. Less familiarity produces less audience demand. Less demand justifies less coverage. The cycle is self-sealing.

War as Economic Policy

Here is the part that rarely makes it into polite analysis: for certain powerful countries, war is not a deviation from normal economic life. It is a structural feature.

The United States has formally declared war only five times since 1789, but has been involved in military interventions, proxy conflicts, covert operations, and arms-supply chains continuously since World War II. This is not incidental. The defence industry is, quite literally, a jobs programme for millions of Americans. More than a third of all engineers and scientists in the United States work in military-related fields. Entire congressional districts are economically dependent on Pentagon contracts. When a senator votes for military aid to any conflict, they are often voting for employment in their own state.

Arms exports are where this gets more explicitly imperial. The U.S. controls 40–45% of the global arms market. Selling weapons to Saudi Arabia means selling into the Yemen conflict. Supporting Israel means supplying Gaza. Arming Ukraine means purchasing leverage over NATO's eastern frontier. Each of these decisions simultaneously constitutes foreign policy, economic stimulus, and a signal to global markets. The connection is not subtle; it is the entire point.

And then there is the stock market dimension. When Donald Trump tweets about Iran, oil futures move within minutes. When escalation language enters the news cycle around the Strait of Hormuz, energy stocks spike and airline stocks fall. This is not metaphorical power. It is the literal economic architecture of global markets being shaped by the geopolitical decisions of a handful of capitals. War, or the credible threat of war, is itself a financial instrument. The countries that wield it understand this completely. The countries that suffer from it often cannot afford to.

This is why a conflict with Sudan, where the combatants have no particular leverage over Western oil supplies or trade routes, generates so little political urgency, and therefore so little media pressure. There is no lobby for Sudan in Washington. There is no defence contractor whose stock price rises when Khartoum burns.

The New Gatekeepers and Their Limits

Social media was supposed to change this. And in some partial, chaotic, insufficient way, it has. The Israel-Gaza war became the first major conflict where footage from the ground, filmed by ordinary people on phones, circulated globally faster than any editorial team could process it. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X became the primary source of conflict documentation for millions of people under 35, often explicitly contradicting the framing offered by major broadcast networks. For Sudan, too, diaspora communities have used social media to fill gaps that foreign journalists couldn't or wouldn't.

But the platforms are not neutral either. Content moderation decisions, which accounts get restricted, which hashtags get suppressed, which languages trigger algorithmic flags- are made by private companies under varying degrees of government pressure. The architecture of attention on social media reflects its own version of the same power dynamics: engagement algorithms favour content that generates emotional reaction in large, primarily English-speaking audiences. A video from Khartoum struggles, in raw algorithmic terms, to compete with footage from a conflict zone that has been covered by Western media long enough to build an existing audience.

The gatekeepers have changed. The gates have not moved very much.

What Selective Coverage Does to the World

This is not an abstract problem. When a conflict goes uncovered, several things happen in sequence: international pressure fails to materialise; diplomatic intervention lags; aid funding is slower and smaller than the need; war crimes go unwitnessed and therefore largely unpunished; and the perpetrators of violence face no reputational cost from the global community whose opinion they might otherwise care about.

Sudan is the cleanest current example. The scale of suffering, by every independent measure, rivals or exceeds what is happening in Gaza or what happened in the early years of the Syrian civil war. But the international community's response, in terms of sanctions, peacekeeping pressure, and diplomatic urgency, has been anaemic by comparison. That is not a coincidence. It is the direct downstream effect of a media ecosystem that, through a hundred small editorial choices and one large structural reality, decided that this particular catastrophe was not quite worth the full machinery of global outrage.

The people who benefit from selective coverage are, reliably, the people conducting wars they would prefer the world not see clearly. Authoritarian governments have learned this lesson and applied it methodically. China restricts journalists' access to Xinjiang and hosts media summits in Urumqi to offer curated counter-narratives. The Rapid Support Forces in Sudan operate in areas where internet blackouts make independent verification nearly impossible. The silence is not incidental; it is manufactured.

The Question We Keep Not Asking

There is a harder question underneath all of this that almost no major media institution will ask directly: if the hierarchy of suffering in global coverage is not determined by the scale of human need, what is it determined by?

The answer, assembled from the evidence, is not complicated. It is just ugly. Coverage follows power. Specifically, the power to make your catastrophe legible to the people who control the microphone, to have a lobby in Washington, a diaspora with political reach, a conflict that moves oil futures or defence stocks, a geography that threatens European borders, a face that looks familiar to a Western editor assigning tomorrow's front page.

None of those things measures suffering. Not one of them counts the children. Not one of them registers the cities that have been eaten alive.

And the people who run these wars know it. China restricts journalists' access to Xinjiang and hosts stage-managed media summits in Urumqi to offer curated counter-narratives. Sudan's Rapid Support Forces operate amid deliberate internet blackouts, using silence as a military strategy. Authoritarian actors have learned that the most effective thing you can do before the first shot is fired is to make sure no one is watching. The camera is the accountability. Kill the camera first.

Meanwhile, a single tweet from a world leader can move the stock market. One statement about Iran sends oil futures spiking within minutes. The Strait of Hormuz twitches, and pension funds across three continents feel it. This is the obscene arithmetic of our moment: the suffering of millions in Sudan cannot break into the news cycle, but the threat of suffering, weaponised by a powerful enough actor, aimed at a market sensitive enough, dominates every financial terminal on earth before breakfast.

This is not a media problem. It is a power problem. The media is just where the power becomes visible.

Until coverage is proportional to need rather than to geopolitical convenience, until the military-industrial-media complex is named and interrogated rather than treated as ambient background noise, the hierarchy will hold. Some wars will be given to you in high definition, with correspondents on the ground and breaking news alerts at 2 am. Others will consume entire populations in near-total darkness, as briefly noted in paragraph fourteen of a wire report nobody clicks.

Somewhere, someone with a great deal to gain made sure you knew which was which.

You are not uninformed. You have been managed. 

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