Why some wars don’t make headlines

As of 2025, there were 59 active state-based conflicts happening around the world, the highest number since World War Two, according to the Institute for Economics & Peace, a think tank. But beyond those in Ukraine and the Middle East, few are likely to garner many news headlines. 

I wanted to explore the reasons why this keeps happening. So I interviewed three journalists from Burkina Faso, Uganda and Ethiopia who’ve covered some of these conflicts in the past. They described their frustrations at the lack of coverage for stories which have a profound human impact and how to increase their visibility in the years to come.

“When I started my career, my editor at the Ottawa Citizen told me that my story was too fringe. He said most of their readers were white, and they weren’t interested in Ethiopia,” said Samuel Getachew, who left Canada for Ethiopia to better tell the stories of his birth country. 

Getachew is now despairing at the relative lack of outside interest in a country which has had an outsized share of tragedies, including several major wars and famines within recent memory. But he says he understands commercial pressures and the kind of news fatigue that disincentivise news coverage of his country. “[They] are no longer interested because there is no hope,” he said, as he prepared to visit Ethiopia’s Tigray region, where a fragile peace shows signs of fracturing.

What gets covered and what doesn’t

Getachew and other journalists interviewed for this article have reported from Africa for large international and Western news organisations, including the Associated Press, the BBC and Al Jazeera. This perhaps belies the idea that some conflicts are not covered at all by global media organisations. But some analyses do show that conflicts and crises in poorer countries, and particularly in Africa, do get less attention than others.

Every year, the Norwegian Refugee Council publishes a list of the most neglected displacement crises, many of which arise from armed conflicts. It factors in the levels of humanitarian funding and the amount of political will devoted to addressing them. It also considers the extent of media attention, evaluating the potential reach of articles published in several global languages while weighing this coverage against the human toll in each country. In 2024, all 10 crises received ‘negligible’ media coverage, according to the report.

Among the 10 most neglected crises identified in the report, eight are in Africa, with Honduras and Iran making up the list. In Iran’s case, it is the plight of six million Afghan refugees living in the country that is going largely ignored rather than its active military involvements or security crises. 

At the top of the list is Cameroon, where violence and conflict, combined with flooding and drought, have left over one million people internally displaced and millions more facing hunger. Ethiopia and Mozambique, which have also suffered conflict and climate shocks, are second and third on the list.

A study by the European Journalism Observatory found that only around 10% of airtime was devoted to the Global South in the leading German, Swiss and Austrian public broadcasting bulletins. Another analysis, this time by Vision of Humanity, looked specifically at what types of conflicts earn headlines, finding “media coverage often reflects a narrow lens, shaped more by geopolitical significance than by humanitarian urgency.” 

The group compared datasets of global media coverage with that of conflicts and violence around the world. Part of the research, authored by Chloe Yarnell, looked at the median number of news articles per conflict-related civilian death across countries. It found more than 1,600 articles for each civilian death in high income countries, compared to 17 in low-income countries.

This hierarchy of victimhood can also play out within conflicts. Though the war in Gaza has received significant coverage, some victims are given more media attention than others. 

A study by the Center for Media Monitoring, a UK-based independent non-profit tracking news covering of Islam and Muslims, looked at more than 35,000 pieces of BBC news content in the year from 7 October 2023, and found 33 times more coverage per Israeli fatality than Palestinian. This is aside from other problematic issues around tone, language and which voices get platformed, also identified by CfMM.

Another correlating factor is the nature of the conflicts themselves. Violent disputes between two or more sovereign countries receive significantly more coverage than conflicts occurring within a single country. This is often due to interstate conflicts, such as those between Russia and Ukraine, or Iran and the US and Israel, being seen as having greater implications for wider global politics and international economic stability, and therefore being more relevant for Western news audiences. 

“In contrast, conflicts in regions with less economic influence are more likely to be overlooked, regardless of their severity or humanitarian consequences,” writes Yarnell in her VoH analysis.

In her role as editor–in-chief at The Continent, a pan-African news publication based in South Africa, Ugandan journalist Lydia Namubiru says she has some sympathy for her counterparts in the West prioritising what they see as their audience’s primary concerns. But she thinks assumptions around who an organisation’s core audience is, and what their key interests are, need to be updated. 

“The New York population is not the only audience of The New York Times,” she told me. 

Frank (not his real name) is a journalist based in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second city. He chose to remain anonymous for this interview due to potential retribution from the government. 

The NRC report ranks Burkina Faso as the country with the fourth most neglected displacement crisis in the world, with around two million of its population internally displaced, roughly 10% of its total. According to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief charity, non-state armed groups control half the country and essential goods and services are prevented from reaching civilians.

Frank blames the deterioration in press freedom in the country for the lack of media attention his country receives. Burkina Faso is ruled by military authorities, led by Captain Ibrahim Traore, which came to power in September 2022. This followed an earlier coup in the same year which overthrew the democratically elected government. In early 2026, the government formally dissolved all political parties.

“After the coup, everything got complicated, and it's really, really, really risky [to practice journalism],” Frank told me. When it comes to more routine news stories, there is still space for journalists to cover them. “But if it is something linked to security or the fight against terrorism, if you are not praising the government, you better shut up, right?”

He said the government “wants to take control of everything, and the first thing they did was to take control of the narrative.” The authorities’ desire to manage their public image has led to a harsh crackdown on the ability of independent journalists to operate freely in the country.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Burkina Faso 105th in its 2025 Press Freedom Index, down 19 places from the year before. RSF says the political and security situation “has led to a considerable increase in pressure on and abuses against journalists, fostering self-censorship within the profession.” Frank explains the government has limited the ability of journalists to move around freely to cover news across the country.

International media have also felt this crackdown. As far back as 2023, two French journalists working for Le Monde and Libération, who were working in the country legally, were expelled. This followed their reporting on video footage which allegedly showed the bodies of executed children at a military base. Ten media outlets have been suspended from the country, including German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) and The Guardian.

Deutsche Welle journalists in Ethiopia were also temporarily suspended and in February three Reuters journalists had their credentials revoked after alleging the government was facilitating training for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.

Restrictions on press freedom bear heavily on journalists in Ethiopia, Getachew said. He has been discredited, doxxed and threatened by people from all sides and told me: “Many people tell me my days are numbered.”

Ethiopia is sub-Saharan Africa’s second biggest jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and journalists are frequently detained on defamation or terrorism charges.

Getachew says he visits colleagues in prison regularly, adding that many others have given up on journalism and left the country, “probably driving taxis in London or Toronto or Washington, DC.” Similarly, Frank believes “journalism is dead in Burkina Faso,” and he is considering pivoting to a less dangerous career.

Economic pressure on news outlets is also taking its toll. The funding crisis in international journalism was exacerbated last year by the White House’s cuts to USAID. The agency’s annual media budget of $268 million, which supported over 700 news organisations worldwide, amounted to half of government spending on public interest journalism worldwide.

The question of relevance

In early 2022, as Russian forces invaded Ukraine, CBS Senior News Correspondent Charlie D’Agata was criticised for calling Kyiv “a relatively civilised, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.” 

He later apologised, saying he meant Ukraine “had not really seen this scale of war in recent years” unlike other countries he had covered. D’Agata’s assertion was untrue: 14,000 were killed and millions displaced in Ukraine’s Donbas region between 2014 and 2022. 

But it is clear that a perceived level of affinity and cultural proximity, whether accurate or not, does matter for news coverage, with the victims of some wars seen as having more in common with Western news audiences. Even when news agencies report on some of these conflicts from the ground, their coverage is rarely picked up by most news organisations, or not featured as prominently as news on Ukraine or the Middle East.   

Frank says that journalists need to do more to explain the links between what is happening in one country and how it could affect those who feel removed from the consequences. He cites refugees fleeing to Europe as one example of this. Audiences see “what is going on in Kyiv is nearer than what is going on in Ouagadougou. It is up to us journalists to explain the connection between Burkina Faso and British [and Western] audiences.”

The impact of international news organisations inadequately reporting some conflicts is not just felt on the ground in the countries where they are taking place. Even on their own terms, ‘Western interests’ are not served by misunderstanding events in countries far away. 

Namubiru, the editor of The Continent, points to a dispute involving mining firm Barrick Gold who had to settle with the Malian government for $430 million. “Part of it is they didn't quite appreciate the political context they were walking into.” She says international business would do better if Africa was “better understood and not over simplified.”

But by explaining a topic’s relevance to Western audiences, does it risk implying that a conflict only matters insofar as it affects them? Furthermore, should Western media coverage be a goal at all? 

“We have to hold two conflicting ideas in our heads,” said Namibiru. “Yes, it shouldn't matter. But in fact, it does matter.” 

Firstly, she said, despite being based thousands of miles away, these news organisations have far more resources and the capacity to cover under-reported conflicts. Secondly, global decision makers inevitably consume Western media. “The world is full of misinformed, under-informed people with good intentions crafting solutions that flounder as soon as they land that create their own problems,” she says.

Namubiru’s belief about Western media’s responsibility to accurately and sensitively cover conflicts in Africa led to her voicing her frustration at a piece about Sudan by Anne Applebaum, with pictures by Lynsey Addario, which The Atlantic headlined “The War About Nothing” in print.  

Namubiru responded on LinkedIn: “How about gold at a time of record shattering prices? How about the inherent risks in creating a militia to do the dirty work of a 40-year dictatorship? How about the fragility that comes from a state being under western sanctions for decades?” In her post she continued to describe the driving causes of the war, concluding: “If anything, it’s the war about everything.”

Namubiru expanded on her thoughts in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review in which she does concede that “in some ways” the article was better than the headline suggested, but she said: “Often, the problem with Western media is that it’s looking in from a distance. And it’s not really looking in from a position of intellectual curiosity. It’s more like: ‘Let’s see what’s happening over there.’”

In a statement to CJR, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, said: “The suggestion that our work is somehow erasing this humanitarian catastrophe is absurd. The headline, “The War About Nothing” refers to the nihilism of warring leaders who cause chaos and death across Sudan, and not to the Sudanese people who are suffering so terribly.”

What can be done?

With restrictions on foreign reporters entering some countries, or a lack of will to send them, partnerships between international correspondents, domestic reporters and news organisations are one way journalism can be strengthened and improved.

In response to the Atlantic’s article on the Sudanese civil war, The Continent published articles by several Sudanese journalists sharing their perspectives and reportage on the conflict. This model of working with (and valuing) local reporters is one which Namubiru believes offers a model of success for Western media.

But there are significant barriers to constructing such partnerships. Frank said Western journalists are often mistrustful of local reporters: “They want to come on the ground and see for themselves what's going on, because they are afraid of information being manipulated.” He thinks these beliefs are lazy cliches and “need to be combated.” 

On the other hand, some domestic journalists are fearful that working with international journalists and having their byline on an article over which they don’t have full control may draw unwanted attention from the authorities. 

Namubiru said there is often a misalignment between international reporters and those from the country. “Typically, what big global news organisations do is, yes, they hire local reporters, but they don’t treat them with much dignity,” she said, using them for more routine work such as booking interviews rather than valuing their perspectives on the issue at hand. “It starts with changing who we see as a legitimate reporter,” she told me.

Differences in how journalists in partnership approach their work may also need to be addressed, including through training. 

“It does often mean a lot more work for editors, because their writing conventions and traditions, ways of speaking to things, will not automatically occur to a local reporter,” said Namubiru, but this is worth it in order to produce richer, more nuanced coverage.

The report by the Norwegian Refugee Council recommends journalists “report in a way that places a focus on human stories, the humanitarian impact of conflicts.” But it rarely happens for many conflicts around the world. 

In Ukraine, Getachew said, “we know the people that have been killed, the people that have been abused, whether they play the piano or whether they're number one in high school,” whereas for conflicts in Africa, victims are often reduced to statistics. In his reporting, he said, he always tries “to really give you a name and a face and the story behind the figures.”

Dr. Martin Scott, Professor of Media and Global Development at the University of East Anglia in the UK, argues that a shift to a more ‘humanitarian journalism’ entails active decisions to focus on under-reported issues and to platform largely ignored voices. 

“We need humanitarian journalists alongside mainstream journalists, so that we have a more rich, diverse set of professional practices covering crises around the world from different perspectives with different ideas,” said Scott in a recent podcast for the New Humanitarian.

Western audiences should also be conditioned to not expect simple solutions, says Namubiru. They “need to be cultured back to ‘this is complex, you are going to have to read about it over and over again, you are going to have to keep up with it.’” It’s a move away from the landmark, front cover piece on Sudan, to a more “lifelong commitment” to fully understanding an issue, she says.

Many of the solutions to better coverage of under-reported conflicts still rely on rejecting “hierarchies of visibility in global and regional media ecosystems,” as scholar Hussein AlAhmad, from the Arab American University in Ramallah, Palestine, describes coverage of Sudan. 

A greater amount of in-depth coverage, and more investment in training and protection for local reporters, is resource intensive. But as Namubiru says, “it does cost a lot of money, but so does getting it wrong.”