Since Oct. 7 2023, one could hardly venture onto the internet without hearing mass outcry over the Palestinian dead or Israeli hostages. But, in April 2023 Sudan plunged into a violent civil war, and those images are decidedly missing from news reports. Though perhaps it is an ugly truth, it is nevertheless undeniable that some conflicts and some deaths receive much more attention than others. 

Some conflicts garner enraged outcries begging for ceasefire. Some don’t. Images of some bomb-out cities inhabit the front pages of newspapers. Some don’t. This disparity is shockingly unsurprising. Wealth matters. Prominence matters. Trendiness matters. Seemingly, the only message to be taken from this over and under publicization is that frankly, some lives do matter more. 

According to Vision of Humanity, a non-partisan organization run under the Institute for Economics and Peace that gathers information related to conflicts throughout the world, the median number of articles reporting on the conflict per civilian death was 1,663 for high-income countries. For low-income countries though, this number shrank all the way to 17.4. 

Money matters. Countries with high GDPs get more attention. Frequently, these countries are more economically integrated into the global economy, making them politically more significant. Dead civilians in more developed countries get more attention, more outcry, than the same dead family in a poor country. 

On the exact same note, a country’s political importance plays a major role in the attention when will receive. When the heavyweight countries, Russia, China, the U.S. ect. ect. get involved, the internet breaks. This too, is logical. The world collectively holds its breath when a conflict involves a superpower, and those conflicts amass attention rapidly. When Russia invades a U.S. backed Ukraine, fear spreads. When Israel sends missiles to Iran, global terror is palpable. 

On the flip side, globally ‘insignificant’ countries are glossed over when their civilians face war and violence. Starting in 2020, the Tigray war soon became one of the bloodiest conflicts since 2000, with death toll estimates from the Council on Foreign Relations set around 600,000 people in two years. 

In a remarkably gross oversimplification, the Trigray war was a conflict in Ethiopia between the Ethiopian government allied with Eritrea against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). As a whole, conflicts in Africa are much less likely to be reported on than those in other regions. According to Vision of Humanity, during the 2014 Gaza war, the New York Times wrote 134 articles on the conflict. At the exact same time, the paper averaged 4-5 articles per month on the civil war in the Central African Republic. The civil war was twice as deadly. 

At some point, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The conflicts frequently reported on will begin to matter to the public. This creates a demand for information, and journalism like anything else is a market responsible to its consumers. Some conflicts tear through social media and news outlets. Some don’t. But, people are still dying in either war.