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Reality can change in one moment, as you could see in Nepal and Tibet. What a weird time to be alive.
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Sanne

DEEP DIVE

Who gets to be “one of us” in the news?

Last week, Al Jazeera's correspondent Step Vaessen, a Dutch journalist who spent over a decade covering Asia for Dutch public broadcaster NOS, shared an insightful anecdote in an interview. When she was based in Jakarta, Indonesia, and about to cover the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, whose epicenter was off the coast of Sumatra, she proposed traveling to Indonesia's Aceh province, which was hardest hit. But her editors wanted her in Thailand instead.

Why? Because that's where Dutch and other Western tourists were. She pushed back and told her editors she couldn't reach anyone in Aceh, meaning it was likely very bad over there. She had to "nag really hard" to convince them she had to go. Thailand had around 5,000 losses in that tsunami, whereas Aceh calculated around 175,000.

The presenter asks Vaessen what she thinks is behind the editor's request. She mentions us as Dutch people "not being able to identify" with the victims in Indonesia:

"I can hardly explain it, because I don't understand it myself either. The people are seen as really different."

Vaessen fought her editors over the decision, but can't fully explain it. Decolonial scholar Rolando Vázquez Melken, whose course I once took, would call this a question of positionality.

The default "white" way of seeing

It would be easy to state that the Dutch editors are bluntly racist, giving preference to white bodies over brown and Black ones. But Vázquez says that's not really the useful way to think about how "whiteness” works.

Instead, he mentions an invisible "default" way of seeing things: the version of the story that gets told first, that everyone's expected to already understand, and that doesn't need any extra explaining (the Dutch tourists on holiday in Thailand).

The people and stories outside of that default need more explanation, and there is more of an effort to make the case for why they matter too. Vázquez's point is that in Western societies, the "default" usually belongs to whiteness because of how history worked out. The people who built the institutions and whose experience became the assumed starting point are the white people.

So being "white" in this sense is more about the position you occupy than about the fact that your skin is white. It also means that an editor of colour in the example of Vaessen may have made the same request. Whiteness isn't just for white people.

Vázquez's theory explains why some people/experiences become the default. And that default is reproduced through several mechanisms in journalism: proximity, English-language infrastructure, and also the “formula of news”.

Proximity and the English-language

When seeing the headlines about the tragic flood disaster in Nepal last week, which has killed 616 people so far and left thousands missing, the story hook for Dutch media is to mention the Dutch people missing early on in the report. At some point, NOS even headlined "About 90 Americans missing after floods in Nepal and Tibet" on their front page (now it's part of a thread article).

There's a defensible journalistic principle at play here: proximity as one of the oldest concepts in journalism. Audiences are more likely to engage with people who share their nationality and culture. There's also a service-journalism function: someone might recognize a name, have a family member traveling in the region, or need embassy updates. A national broadcaster funded by and built for a national audience is doing its job.

Why do Dutch media mention American victims explicitly, though? Much of the world's international news, including non-US outlets, still runs on American and British wire services (AP, Reuters) and English-language infrastructure. An "Americans missing" angle gets picked up more easily simply because it's already been packaged and distributed globally. The wire service desks reproduce the Western position.

The formula of news

Besides proximity and the Western wire services, Nepali editor Kunda Dixit brought another point of criticism forward in the context of foreign media crews covering Nepal's 2015 earthquake.

Dixit describes how hard it is to file a story that doesn't fit the "formula of news," quite literally the same "from Haiti to Haiyan, from Nargis to Nepal," he writes:

Dixit also mentions the severe focus on negative news, with hardly any attention to the fact that many buildings in Kathmandu were still standing, phones were working, the airport was functioning, electricity was restored within three days, and only 14 of Nepal's 75 districts were affected.

It gives a distorted picture of reality with real consequences, he writes. Most reporters had left before the 2015 aftershocks hit, which ties into a point Indian journalist Nidhi Jamwal makes: it is very expensive to parachute an international crew into a country. Why not invest that money in local journalists long-term instead, so coverage continues after the initial peak?

Where race shows up

Proximity and the news formula explain a lot of the patterns that keep repeating themselves, but not all of them. It doesn't explain why Vaessen's editors wanted Thailand instead of, rather than alongside, Aceh. It also doesn't explain why foreign desks would parachute in an expensive colleague rather than build a more sustainable relationship with the local journalists inside the country.

It's exactly in these vaguer spaces where race shows up. Rarely mentioned explicitly, but our confirmation biases and blind spots lead to decisions we don't fully understand, as Vaessen says herself, and those decisions still produce inequality in reporting.

The same question of who we can picture as "one of us" shows in how the Netherlands has been talking about Ukraine and Gaza.

“They’re just like us”

In the Dutch public debate, this quote by former journalist Joris Luyendijk got a lot of backlash:

The popular opinionmaker Sander Schimmelpenninck also stated that Ukraine is a European country fighting for our shared democratic values, its population lives and thinks "just like us."

Here's where proximity gets interesting: yes, in kilometres, Ukraine is closer than Gaza. But proximity isn't only geography.
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Look at the Netherlands' ties to Israel: we were among the first countries to recognize Israel, in 1949, and remain one of its larger European trading partners, with stakes in Israeli arms, cyber technology, and defense industry. All of that has continued during the genocide in Gaza.
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If proximity means a relationship, not just a shared skin colour or shared democratic values, the Netherlands is closer to Israel than to Ukraine. We just don't call an ally accused of genocide "close to us," because that would mean naming our own complicity, not just our sympathy. That complicity is damage to our own democratic and moral views, but it hits us more slowly, and it’s harder to put in numbers.

Why Gaza and Aceh matter

Ukrainians and Palestinians aren't obviously distinguished by race the way Dutch tourists and Acehnese villagers might be. But there is a distinction in religion (Christian/secular versus Muslim), political alignment (EU-aspiring democracy versus a population under occupation), and colonial-era proximity to "Europeanness”.

This is what Vázquez's framing points at: it's about positionality more than skin colour: the default position in relation to power.

Dutch tourists don't need an explanation on television. Ukrainians get called "just like us" without much argument. Aceh and Gaza both need an effort to explain why they matter to us.

The responsibility lies in noticing this and then making changes. If you never confront your audience with the fact that people in Aceh or the Palestinians have more in common with us than we think, these default assumptions won’t change.

The question journalists need to discuss among each other is: who gets to be “one of us” without us having to explain why they matter?

A checklist for media leaders

When deciding whose stories deserve attention, ask:

• Are you responding to audience demand, or do you also take responsibility in shaping it?​
  “Our audience isn’t interested” can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you never cover a place or community outside of the default, how can audiences become interested in it? Editors have a responsibility to broaden what people care about.
• What do you consider relevant, and who decided that?​
  Proximity, familiarity, and national interest can be useful editorial criteria, but they are not neutral. Ask what kinds of people, places, and experiences you treat as “normal” or the default, and which you make invisible or push to the margins.
• Whose knowledge are you building your coverage around?​
  Before sending reporters in, ask what journalists and communities already know, and whether you are creating relationships or just parachuting yourselves into stories. Local expertise should not be an afterthought or a quote to “balance” the story. Invest in long term relationships.
• What patterns are you reproducing?​
  Look beyond individual stories at the cumulative effect of editorial choices. Who gets covered repeatedly? Whose suffering becomes news? Whose expertise is trusted? And what does your audience learn, over time, about whose lives and experiences matter?

Love to hear your ideas and perspectives.

See you next week!

Sanne