As I was sipping my coffee in the office in the morning, I was preparing the agenda for our newspaper as usual. As I skimmed through the news in the agency pools, I realized that I was adding these events to the agenda with a callousness that has now become a reflex in the face of wars, massacres and disasters. This is an example of the phenomenon of insensitivity instilled in us by the media environment.
As journalists, we face a 24-hour news cycle, and while preparing the news of one disaster, other disasters are already waiting on the agenda. This intensity can make people immune to pain and horror. So when did the world begin to accept Israel's genocide in Palestine as routine?
Since Oct. 7, Israel has been killing the Palestinian people, yet it no longer receives the same initial reaction, though the Palestinians are still being killed just as they were from day one. The daily targeting of Palestinians by Israel has stopped being a headline and has instead become a grim routine. Is the growing indifference to human suffering part of the global media theatre? It makes me ask myself the question.
Today, it wouldn't be wrong to say that headlines like "34 Palestinians killed" appearing daily in news agencies are presented almost like a weather report. The deaths resulting from Israeli attacks are treated as if they were just another routine news item or something too insignificant to be noted – this is nothing new. The media is normalizing this situation and we are adapting to it.
Of course, this is not unique to Palestine. Here are some topics that I added to my daily agenda without being surprised:
We no longer discuss how many people have died but which tragedy will make the headlines. The world is getting used to pain. No matter how big the tragedy is, we consume it in a news cycle of a few hours. An 8-year-old girl named Narin may have been brutally murdered in a village, but days later, this news was replaced by a celebrity controversy on social media.
Recently, in Istanbul, a 19-year-old young man brutally murdered a girl named İkbal, whom he had been obsessed with for five years, as well as his other girlfriend, Ayşegül. After throwing Ikbal’s severed head in front of her family, he jumped off the city walls and committed suicide.
This horrific incident has shaken our country for now, but it will fall out of the headlines in a few days. Even this atrocity becomes a quickly consumed news item, soon to be replaced by another tragedy.
The media has now turned human suffering into mere statistics. Pain and losses are presented through charts. When tragedies are reduced to numbers and labeled as a “disaster” in headlines, our human response to them diminishes. Our eyes grow indifferent to thousands of deaths because these images have become just another part of our screens.
It is worth mentioning that the presentation of the Israeli genocide in the news in this way causes a global loss of empathy and inaction. We can say that the media is trying to dull our sensitivity to such events by making violence the norm and presenting inhumane practices as usual.
Is this the new norm of humanity?
The media isn't just a mirror that reflects events; it's a force that shapes society. Of course, in journalism, the news cycle shifts constantly. However, we cannot let the continuous series of deaths become routine. At its core, the fact that dozens of people die every day is newsworthy in itself.
Although new media technologies seem to have strengthened our ability to hold people accountable, it is shocking how ineffective we are in using this power effectively. While media reaches millions, these platforms serve more to manage perceptions than to pursue justice. Amid the posts on social media about the thousands of killed and injured Palestinians, the reality of "genocide" gets lost in the depths of algorithms.
While we are talking about a country where dozens of innocent people are killed every day, the media can still debate who suffers more. The suffering of Palestinians is not just a news item; it is a human tragedy. The international media needs to address the Palestinian issue not as a headline but as a humanitarian issue because the constant repetition of such news leads to the chronicisation of the continuity of war and attacks.
As we scroll through content on our news feeds, mass deaths and atrocities have become as insignificant as the speed at which we reach the next post – a truly heartbreaking situation.
