Behold, the agenda of Western media

The one-sided reporting on violence in Amsterdam last week is a perfect example of how the international media is a Western cultural product. It fails to give nuance and pushes specific agenda.

Patrick Gathara

In the run-up to the 2013 elections in Kenya, CNN published a story featuring a handful of what it described as members of a “local Kikuyu tribal militia”. Armed with crude weapons, including “guns” made of metal pipes, they comically rolled around on the ground as they supposedly prepared for war. While there was real fear at the time of a repeat of the post-election violence of five years prior, the ludicrous clip illustrated the dangers of journalists parachuting into places with a prepared narrative.

It used to be that this sort of thing only happened in the darker places of the world. But last weekend the people of Amsterdam in the nether regions of sub-Scandinavian Europe were afforded a taste.

It began on Wednesday, the day before Ajax of Amsterdam played Maccabi Tel Aviv, when Israeli football hooligans rampaged through the city. They vandalised property, tore down a Palestinian flag, chanted “we will fuck the Arabs”, and lauded their army.

During the match, Maccabi fans also booed during a minute’s silence for people who died during flooding in Spain that week.

Some locals responded in kind.

But the stories pumped out by the media were stripped of that backstory. They talked of a pre-planned antisemitic pogrom targeting innocent Jewish people, with many linking it to the Holocaust, during which three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population was killed.

Politicians across the West, who have been arming, financing and shielding the genocide in Gaza, were quick to jump on the bandwagon, condemning the violence against the Israelis but having little to say about the behaviour that provoked it.

The “Amsterdam pogrom” was only the latest pro-Israel line from Western outlets that have uncritically regurgitated Israel’s claims about its actions in Gaza, where its army has killed 43,000 people, including adding 137 dead journalists to its history of killing journalists.

In Gaza so-called “international journalists” can claim to have been shut out but access to Amsterdam is not restricted, which makes the reporting even more egregious. While antisemitism may well have played a part in the counterviolence, and antisemitism is on the rise in Europe, to claim that it was its main driver is to cut the facts to fit the story in a manner reminiscent of what CNN did in Kenya over a decade ago.

This is a vindication of the complaints many have had about Western coverage of the African continent. It demonstrates that far from being objective and impartial, the international media is a Western cultural product that pushes elite agendas. The news is not an inert telling of what happened but is frequently massaged to tell a preordained tale.

It is better to rely on local journalists rather than international networks. This might seem obvious given that local journalists most likely have a better, more nuanced understanding of happenings in their own societies. However, as Nilofar Absar explained in The New Humanitarian, there is a hierarchy of credibility in international press that tends to portray the outsider as the person best placed to tell the story.

And so we must invest in our own ability to tell our own stories. The rise of the internet and social media and the ubiquity of smartphones has revolutionised how the news is told and who gets to tell it. While this has provided space for nefarious actors spreading fake news, it has also created opportunities for building local reporting networks that could challenge the oligopoly of international news networks.

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Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan journalist, cartoonist and author