It is curious to what extent we naturalize odd things, and almost we don’t react to -or not even perceive- the difference in media treatment of the same situation, depending on the origin of who are shown in the images.
I’m referring to the fact that we all would say that a 52-year-old man from a town of Afghanistan or Syria, has the same right to honour than a 52-year-old man from a town of UK or France.
We say this, understanding that dignity is human and not something related to passports: is equally inherent to everyone.
But if I were to ask you when was the last time you saw TV images took in a collapsed NHS british hospital, showing mistreated, suffering or wounded people, your answer probably would be that you can’t remember that because actually you never saw something like that on the telly.
However if the question were when have you seen TV images of nearly-naked people lain on stretchers, beds or mattresses in Aleppo, Raqqa, Kabul or Lahore, any of we could say that today in the morning, yesterday at noon or something like 15 times in the last few weeks.

In the western world we do not suffer or the media have more than 1 filter.
Independently of what particular country is at war, suffering a terrorist attack or experiencing a natural disaster, everywhere in the planet people suffer, are not available for media when they are in their intimacy, have a right to privacy and also to be respected in their dignity.
When this kind of events happens, wherever it does, just justifies the existence of this kind of news, but never the difference of treatment depending on where that event took place.
The question here is why a TV camera doesn’t go into a german hospital after a terrorist attack to show the victims in any condition that they are, but in fact it does in Pakistan; what changes?
Why an image of a corpse is more acceptable when lies and belongs to a culturally alien country, than when it lies and belongs to a culturally affine country? Why it is accepted the sight of a little syrian child, drowned and stretched out on the Mediterranean shore and it is considered inappropriate to show a little french child, victim of a terrorist attack in an European city?

Is it natural for us to respect the dignity of someone that is similar to us because is like to respect ourselves?
Is the depiction of the strangers’ sorrow something illustrative and the image of the close sorrow something unacceptable?

At the beginning of this article I pointed out how odd is the naturalization that makes usual all this things described here, but I wonder now if this ethical anaesthesia is a product of mediality -the reality structured in media-, or if media simply replicate structures that already naturally exist in society.
Aren’t we moved by a crying Iraqi woman or man because we are accustomed to see them, product of the huge amount times they appear in the media, or they touch us less because we see them as different, alien, without reflexion in ourselves, non-autobiographical?
Whatever the reason why is, it is appropriate that media treat differently the same tragedy experienced by people that look different?