Joy Reid Blasts Media for Elevating Ukraine Coverage Above ‘Browner’ Conflicts – Even As She Does the Same

Pointing to the media’s extensive coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joy Reid concluded Monday’s ReidOut by critiquing news outlets over the global conflicts they choose to cover – and those they don’t.

While the MSNBC host made some entirely valid observations, her overall assessment rang utterly hollow.

She told her audience:

Now, what we’re seeing in Ukraine is absolutely the worst humanitarian crisis that Europe has seen in decades, but we haven’t witnessed the same type of solidarity for the Yemenis as we do for the Ukrainians. We don’t see historic sanctions or global campaigns, corporations like Airbnb and Netflix taking a stand.

And this is not to say we shouldn’t care this much for Ukraine – far from it. The point is, we should also care this much for refugees in those facing occupation and war in the Middle East, and Asia and Africa too.

The coverage of Ukraine has revealed a pretty radical disparity in how human Ukrainians look and feel to Western media compared to their browner and blacker counterparts, with some reporters using very telling comparisons in their analyses of the war.

Some of this is fair. U.S. media doesn’t focus very much on say, the Tigray War in Ethiopia or the Somali Civil War. And not even President Joe Biden seems particularly interested in trying to end Saudi Arabia’s monstrous behavior in Yemen, thus breaking his promise to do so. It should be said, however, that the war in Ukraine is the largest land campaign in Europe since World War II. To put it mildly, what we’re seeing now is extremely rare on that continent.

But this is a strange flex by Reid. Her show has mirrored its cable news peers when covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and has done so after largely ignoring the war in Yemen and other international conflicts. Indeed, Reid has declined to use her platform on the country’s largest liberal cable network to call on the Biden administration to impose on Saudi Arabia the very kinds of sanctions she mentioned in her monologue.

A search of transcripts in a database called TV Eyes indicates that prior to Monday, Reid hadn’t mentioned the war in Yemen since at least September of last year, possibly longer. However, the war has been mentioned in recent weeks on other MSNBC shows, such as Ayman and The Mehdi Hasan Show. (Mediaite reached out to MSNBC asking if The ReidOut has aired any segments on Yemen, but did not receive a response before publication.)

This isn’t to say that Reid, who I presume has broad latitude to choose the topics her show covers, should run more international stories. After all, it is up to her to decide what she talks about. If she wants turn at least a portion of her show into something akin to BBC’s Newshour to focus on global stories, that is her prerogative.

“This is a teachable moment for us in the media,” she concluded, “We aren’t afraid to call out our industry. There is a lot of soul-searching that we need to do in Western media about why some wars and the lives seem to matter more than others, and why some refugees get a welcome mat while others get the wall.”

Again, this is an entirely fair observation. But unless this “soul-searching” results in some sort of shift in her own show’s coverage going forward, what exactly is the point of her critique here? Reid is not some powerless media critic demanding better and broader coverage from the outside. She is in a position to right what she believes to be a wrong. Whether she actually does is up to her.

Watch above via MSNBC.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.