The selective storytelling applies double standards in domestic vs. global coverage

By Brahma Chellaney
Contributing Writer, The Japan Times

Imagine if Western media had described the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, not as lawlessness and an assault on democracy but as democratic ferment against a corrupt system beholden to money and power. The thought is absurd. Yet in the Global South, politically driven riots — sometimes even violent mob attacks on state institutions — are routinely depicted in Western outlets as righteous uprisings against venal elites.

Western media have perfected a seductive but dangerous narrative: the romanticized tale of youth-led “revolutions” toppling supposedly repressive, graft-ridden governments abroad. In just the past month, coverage of political unrest in Madagascar, Nepal, Indonesia and the Philippines has followed the same script. The ouster of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh in 2024 was packaged as a heroic liberation, only for Islamist repression and chaos to follow.

This is not journalism. It is selective storytelling that applies one moral framework at home and abandons it abroad. What would be denounced as sedition in Washington is rebranded as democratic awakening in a fragile state.

Take Nepal. After mobs began torching one state institution after another — parliament, the supreme court, ministries, banks and even armories — the elected government fell. The West’s narrative machine promptly lionized the new interim prime minister, Sushila Karki, as an “anti-corruption crusader” and Gen Z icon. Her lack of constitutional legitimacy and her husband’s record as a 1973 plane hijacker barely merited a footnote. What mattered was a simple, digestible story: angry young people overthrowing a corrupt regime.

Such hero-making privileges narrative satisfaction over factual complexity. The coordinated arson that gutted Nepal’s public institutions was framed not as criminal destruction but as “youthful idealism.” In reality, democracy requires functioning courts, legislatures and bureaucracies — the very institutions that mobs incinerated. To glorify their destruction is not to defend democracy but to undermine it.

The double standards extend beyond violent upheavals. Consider disasters. In principle, journalism demands sensitivity in reporting grief. In practice, Western coverage of tragedies abroad often traffics in voyeurism, cultural stereotyping and sensationalism.

Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster is one case: Victims’ suffering was reduced to a backdrop for lurid stories about radiation. Workers at the nuclear plant were stereotyped as “nuclear samurai,” “human sacrifices” or “nuclear ninjas on a suicide mission.” Never mind that preventive evacuations ensured no radiation deaths occurred. Grossly misleading comparisons to Chernobyl fed hysteria rather than clarity.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the same skew. According to the World Health Organization, more people officially died in the West than in the non-Western world. The United States led in both cases and deaths. Yet the images Western audiences saw were overwhelmingly from India, Brazil or Africa. When India was ravaged by a two-month wave in the pandemic’s Delta phase, Western media beamed out haunting images of burning pyres and gasping patients in hospitals where foreign crews intruded even into emergency wards. But when mass graves were dug in New York or refrigerated trucks lined Western streets to store bodies, the imagery was sanitized.

Africa has long borne the brunt of such stereotypes. Coverage of the 2014 to 2016 Ebola epidemic, which killed 11,325 people, was drenched in images of body bags, burial rituals and despair. The Pulitzer Prize went to a photographer who shadowed body collectors. The fact that the epidemic was confined to three countries barely registered. To global audiences, Ebola became an “African” disease, cementing a continent-wide stigma.

This pattern extends to war. Western media rarely show images of dead American or European soldiers. Yet they freely publish photographs of slain Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans or Syrians. Grief is privatized at home but paraded abroad.

To be sure, Western outlets are not monolithic, nor are they incapable of occasionally sensationalizing domestic tragedy. But the larger pattern is unmistakable: When violence or disaster occurs outside the West, journalistic norms of restraint, accuracy and dignity are loosened or abandoned.

Why does this matter? Because Western media double as global media. Their frames and images shape international perceptions. When arson and mob violence are repackaged as “revolution” abroad, they gain moral cover that fuels instability rather than reform. When death and disaster are depicted through exoticized lenses, whole societies are reduced to stereotypes.

Consistency is the real test of credibility. If storming Congress is insurrection in Washington, storming parliament cannot be celebrated as democratic ferment in Nepal. If images of mass funerals in New York are shielded from the public eye, burning bodies in New Delhi should not be broadcast as a global spectacle.

The bifurcated lens does not merely distort. It legitimizes abroad what it denounces at home. It excuses destruction when it happens in the Global South while criminalizing it when it happens in the West.

It is time for Western media to abandon these double standards. Thoughtful, responsible journalism requires applying the same rules of coverage everywhere: respect for facts, consistency in moral frameworks and sensitivity toward human suffering. Otherwise, what poses as universal reporting is little more than cultural narcissism disguised as news.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”