Continuous Arab tragedies engender media fatigue

Media fatigue

The news of Palestinian prisoners dying in Israeli jails as a result of their hunger strikes has become secondary news, as Palestinians are killed on a daily basis. Their deaths have become a routine occurrence, mentioned at the end of every newscast.

Iraq is facing similar problems. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, and thousands have been forcibly disappeared.

There are many others whose families don't even know if their loved ones are alive or dead. Corrupt people control the state, which is rich, but the people are poor. It is an oil state that cannot provide even the minimum necessities of life for its citizens who are not affiliated with the authority's militias.

Read more: How systemic corruption plundered Iraq's economy

In Lebanon, the end of its civil war is commemorated and the political agreement that ended it is celebrated. However, politicians who participated in the war are repeating the same mistakes, threatening Lebanon's fragile peace.

In Yemen, we read on social media about Yemeni prisoners who are killed every day under torture in Houthi prisons. Unfortunately, the news of torture-related deaths is no longer shocking. The situation in Libya is no better, where conflict, death, and destruction continue to manifest.

Syria, however, is a tragedy of a greater magnitude. The millions of victims have become the problem, instead of those in power who displaced them, stole their properties, and killed their children

Real perpetrators go unpunished 

With the arrival of summer, we will once again be reading about people dying at sea, trying to escape their dire situation in their home countries. The media will cover stories of those who drowned in the Mediterranean, and, like every year, photos of drowned children will circulate.

Governments will tackle human traffickers, but the real perpetrators who pushed these people and their children into the sea will go unpunished.

It's not the media's fault that it forgets past tragedies when covering new ones. No amount of newspaper or TV coverage can fully capture the tragedies of Arab countries.

This is not surprising given that those who pretend to represent these people are often busy deceiving them, and they are likely the cause of their tragedies.

This failure has plagued us since our false independence. We failed to establish a state and succeeded only in installing regimes that are hostile to their people.

These regimes know that their existence and continuity depend on the absence of state institutions.

Unfortunately, the opposition to these regimes has, in most cases, become a distorted version of them. The opposition disagrees with the authority over who will commit crimes against the people, not over who will build the state that these people deserve.

This opposition is no less opportunistic than the regimes they oppose and have proven capable of committing the same atrocities as the regimes they oppose.

From Palestine to Sudan and everywhere in between, leaders oscillate between quick fixes and dousing fires. But haven't we learned that fires of such magnitude cannot be extinguished this way?

Isn't it time to start putting these fires out rather than ignoring them and letting them consume what little is left of us?