Matt Wickham
We now live in a reality where news cycles last, at best, no more than 24 hours. Information pours in relentlessly, making it nearly impossible to keep up, while pain and suffering have become profitable commodities.
Social media channels race to be the first to share devastating, often deadly news, briefly acknowledged before being discarded as the next tragedy unfolds.
The suffering from the Russia-Ukraine war was something the media sought to exploit in the war’s initial months, but years later, it is now often minimized.
Most reputable Western media adhere to the principles of “truth, fairness, and accountability,” striving to balance their coverage across global tragedies.
However, they sometimes appear too balanced—occasionally, mistakenly giving the aggressor the benefit of the doubt or leaning on Kremlin-fueled narratives in the name of “fair reporting” [more on this can be read here].
This often leaves Ukrainians frustrated, feeling as if their war and daily suffering are now on the periphery, with the world desensitized to their struggle.
But is this really the case?
Falling on Deaf Ears in the West?
It’s easy to understand why Ukrainians feel frustrated when Western news provides little coverage of Ukraine.
No longer does Ukraine’s suffering top the daily headlines, even after nights of drone attacks or war crimes killing civilians in their sleep.
Yet, is this lack of front-page coverage truly surprising?
After 2.5 years of full-scale war and over a decade of conflict, what’s one more airstrike? What’s one more child pulled from the rubble?
They’ve seen it all before: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, then Ukraine, and now Gaza. The gut-wrenching feeling they once had when witnessing a child being rescued from the debris of a bombed house has faded.
Emotional Detachment
This constant exposure to tragedy has led to a certain numbness. Where once shock and heartbreak drove us to engage, now it often leads to turning away or disengagement.
American essayist Susan Sontag addresses this in her book ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, “it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad. Many more would be switching channels if the news media were to devote more time to the particulars of human suffering caused by war and other infamies. But it is probably not true that people are responding less. That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images.”
Sontag acknowledges that repeated images of suffering may cause people to become less emotionally affected, i.e, desensitized. However, she argues that this doesn’t lessen the moral or ethical significance of the images.
Perhaps she’s right.
After all, Ukraine still remains one of the most talked-about events—whether the portrayal is positive, negative, or if no longer holding front page headlines—it may even be the key ‘deal-breaker’ issue in the U.S. presidential election this November.
Changing Media Coverage
Even though support for Ukraine has decreased somewhat, Ukraine’s victory remains a shared position in the U.S.
According to an August 17-20 Economist/YouGov poll, 22% of U.S. adults believe Ukraine is winning. Although 22% seems small, this is the first time since 2023 that more Americans believe Ukraine will win than Russia.
So, perhaps it would be unfair to claim that the West is desensitized to the war and Ukraine’s suffering. Perhaps the West is still engaged but has adapted to the new reality, or is tired of (often Ukrainian created) sensationalism.
Still, for Ukrainians, this balance feels deeply unfair. Their daily suffering no longer dominates Western conversations because it doesn’t directly impact those in the West, as it did in the initial weeks when threats of nuclear war loomed large (as they do again today, hence Ukraine’s temporary return to the Western’s media agenda).
While war and suffering have always been part of humanity, for many in the safety of Western civilization, these horrors have long felt distant.
With the rise of social media, however, these brutal, non-stop realities are now inescapable, thrust into our lives from the comfort of our homes through the gadget in your hand right now.
Desensitization, however, seems to me a choice—a psychological defence mechanism that many understandably adopt.
Yet while many in the West may have grown accustomed to daily reports of Russian terror attacks and civilian deaths, this is more a case of adaptation than desensitization—similar to how Ukrainians have had to do the same, to cope with their own daily tragedies of Russia’s war.