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The Triage Model of Media 

A call for reorganizing U.S. media so as to meaningfully reduce human suffering

In the United States there is a mass media apparatus that is exceptionally effective at marshaling the public’s support for (or at least tolerance of) the agendas of state and corporate power. In the nation with the most military and financial power in human history, this often means tolerance of violence in the form of outright war or sanctions against nations deemed to be “official enemies.” 

From World War One to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to the present day, the media has proven to be an indispensable partner to the U.S. government in propagandizing a public that might otherwise oppose brutality inflicted on foreign peoples. This form of messaging is what intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman termed, “The Propaganda Model.”  In this structure, U.S. mainstream media cultivate public consent for violent U.S. policies through several methods. These tactics include but are not limited to exaggerating or emphasizing the malevolent behavior of U.S. adversaries, while deemphasizing or not covering crimes of the U.S. or U.S. clients. 

The harm inflicted by this propaganda system is hard to overstate.  Even limiting one’s analysis to the last two decades, U.S. wars, economic sanctions and covert subversion have killed, maimed, displaced, and traumatized tens of millions. Accomplishing such devastation would be a far more difficult task without the consenting population that results from the Propaganda Model of media. 

What follows is a proposal for a new model of media; one which if adopted would yield a U.S. public that would serve as a more formidable obstacle for state and corporate power. The end result would be a significant reduction in human suffering.

U.S. mainstream media has been extremely effective in generating public consent for catastrophic policies such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq [Source: responsiblestatecraft.org]

Introducing The Triage Model

An unfortunate assumption held by many is that the major news outlets are neutral actors, exercising no discretion in reporting the major stories of the day.  However, at any given time there are millions of stories occurring in the world. With limits on air time, page space and investigative resources, news publications make choices as to which stories to cover and which to ignore; which to emphasize and which to minimize. In other words, media outlets give priority to some stories and some perspectives over others. 

Similar dynamics exist in non-media settings wherein finite resources demand that priorities are set as to how they are utilized. Perhaps the most dramatic of such situations are emergencies where many people demand medical attention. Here, the principle of triage care becomes applicable. In a triage situation first responders and health professionals administer care based on where it is most needed and where it will have the most effect. Triage care rests upon the following principles:

  1.   The most dire injuries are prioritized for treatment over less severe ones. 

AND

  1.  Sadly, treatment must be prioritized to those for whom treatment has a realistic chance to save, versus those whose wounds are beyond the capacity of first responders to help.  

When applied properly, triage care has the effect of saving many lives and dramatically reducing human suffering. If U.S. media adopted the basic principles that apply in triage care, a “Triage Model” of media, so too could human misery be reduced at a global scale. 

Current Media Priorities

In their book Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman demonstrate that under the Propaganda Model, U.S. media disproportionately focus on the alleged crimes of official enemies while giving comparatively less attention to the atrocities perpetrated by the U.S. or U.S. proxies. This is most easily demonstrated by comparing U.S. news outlets’ coverage of similar events that take place at the same time. Such paired examples are instructive as to how U.S. media prioritize their coverage.

Manugactorinconsent2.jpg
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, articulates the Propaganda Model with many examples [Source: wikipedia.org]

A Tale of Two Genocides

 Among the most revealing of the paired events are the 1970’s genocides in Cambodia and East Timor. While the Khmer Rouge’s atrocity in Cambodia certainly cannot be explained without attention to prior US actions in Southeast Asia, the perpetrators of the act were not direct U.S. clients at the time of the genocide. Thus the victims of the Khmer Rouge could be distanced from U.S. policy. 

By contrast, the mass murder that began in 1975 in East Timor  was perpetrated by Indonesia, a government with close ties to the U.S. In fact, the Indonesian army that invaded East Timor and subsequently killed a third of the population had been armed and trained by the United States. 

U.S. president Gerald Ford and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger had even visited with the Indonesian dictator Suharto the day before the invasion of East Timor and gave the greenlight to the crime. The duo sought to conceal U.S. involvement, informing Suharto that,  “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly” and that “It would be better if it were done after we returned[to the United States.]” 

“We will understand and will not press you on the issue,”- U.S. president Gerald Ford regarding Indonesian dictator Suharto’s plan to invade East Timor. [Source:nsarchive2.gwu.edu

Further establishing U.S. support for the extermination of the East Timorese was the diplomatic cover provided at the United Nations. It was U.S. policy to sabotage UN efforts to stop the slaughter in East Timor, an endeavor confirmed by the words of UN ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 

“The U.S. wished things to turn out as they did in East Timor and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me and I carried it out with no inconsiderable success.”  

While the evidence is clear that in East Timor the U.S. facilitated one of the worst crimes of the second half of the 20th century, one would not have known it from U.S. media coverage at the time. 

The paper of record, the New York Times, granted the U.S. perpetrated atrocity just 70 inches of column space between 1975 and 1979. 

Comparatively, in the same time frame, the Times issued 1,175 inches of column space to the coverage of the Cambodian genocide. Priority was clearly given to the victims of violence that could not directly be attributed to the United States. Contrastingly, those whose misery was authored by the United States, were deprioritized, their stories untold, their trauma erased from history. 

Cambodia- East Timor Redux

We see a similar dynamic in the present. U.S. media continues to give disproportionate coverage to the crimes that can be attributed to U.S. enemies, while giving comparatively little or no coverage to the human misery inflicted by the U.S. or U.S. clients. 

Currently, the prime example of this tendency is illustrated by the non-stop reporting of Russia’s (a U.S. enemy) invasion of Ukraine, while the U.S- Saudi war in Yemen is ignored. 

While some independent outlets have already scrutinized this gap in coverage, a few facts demonstrate the severity of the disparity:

  1. MSNBC, the network generally seen as the leading liberal broadcast network, went an entire year without covering the war on Yemen, even as the UN had proclaimed it to be the worst humanitarian crisis in the world 
  2. In U.S. media more broadly, there has been more coverage of Ukraine in just 2022 than there has been of Yemen in the last 12 years. 
  3. As of 2020, 5 years since the Yemen conflict began in 2015, U.S. media had given a total of 92 minutes to cover the crisis. To give an idea of scale, consider that in 2018 alone, US media gave 242 minutes of coverage to  California Wildfires. 
  4. In a six day period from  2/21/22-2/28/22 US outlets, Fox News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, ran nearly 1,300 stories about Ukraine.  They devoted precisely 0 stories to Yemen in that same time frame.

Clearly U.S. media coverage is clearly not dictated by triage principles. The example of disproportionately prioritizing the crisis in Ukraine over the humanitarian disaster in Yemen conveys an agenda oriented toward advancing the interests of state and corporate power rather than a desire to reduce the amount of human misery in the world.

The Triage Model Applied to Current Events

A very severe injury requiring immediate attention:

While both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen are atrocities that should be covered, if U.S. media were adhering to the Triage Model, the breakdown of that coverage would look very different. The Yemen war clearly meets the triage criteria which calls for prioritizing the most severe situations. According to the United Nations the situation in Yemen is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. There have been at least 377,000 killed and many millions more remaining at risk of starvation. Children are by far the most at risk as current estimates detail that a Yemeni child dies every 75 seconds from deprivation. Presently, this is many degrees of magnitude more dire than Ukraine and thus in most need of “treatment.”

The U.S.-Saudi War on Yemen has caused the deaths of 85,000 children, largely due to the blockade induced famine [Source: theguardian.com

Who can a US audience realistically “treat?”

 The Yemen catastrophe meets the second triage criteria- that “treatment” should be prioritized for those who can actually be helped over those who are beyond the capacity to help.

The United States is deeply culpable for the ongoing carnage in Yemen. This complicity involves providing Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars worth of weapons, maintenance and spare parts for planes, military intelligence, training and diplomatic cover.

From 2015 until 2018, the U.S. was even providing mid-air refueling to Saudi fighter jets while they were enroute to bomb Yemeni targets. Just as was the case in East Timor, the genocide in Yemen is an atrocity made possible by the USA. 

According to many experts including Bruce Reidel,  a former CIA official and presidential adviser on the Middle East, without U.S. support the Saudi war on Yemen, “would end tomorrow.” Concurring with that view is Yemeni American scholar and activist Shireen al-Adeimi, who summarizes the Saudi’s total dependence on the U.S. as, 

“The pilot is flying a U.S. made plane, has been trained by U.S. personnel, his plane (after drops US bombs). Ends up getting serviced by U.S. personnel, spare parts are provided by the U.S., the targets were chosen with the support of the U.S. Every step of the way the U.S. is helping, facilitating and enabling the coalition bombing of Yemen.”

Because mass murder in Yemen is an atrocity being perpetrated by the U.S., it is far more “treatable” from the perspective of the US public than the invasion of Ukraine is. At its core this is a simple concept. If one is currently engaged in inflicting suffering on someone else, the easiest way to reduce that suffering is to cease in the activity that is causing it. The U.S. and its clients could dramatically reduce misery in the world by simply discontinuing their suffering inducing behaviors. 

Former President Trump continued a long standing American tradition of selling weapons to the Saudi monarchy. [Source: theguardian.com

Where is our outrage useful?

People of any nation have the greatest capacity to affect the behavior of their own government. Some may point to the fact that the U.S. is an oligarchic corporate state in which the public has little capacity to influence the policies of their government. However, even autocracies can only maintain protracted war and violence if the populace tolerates it. When a public becomes disenchanted with a war, it becomes far more difficult to prosecute. There are historical examples of this. The Russian withdrawal from WWI was the result of the war weary population overthrowing the Czar and eventually ending Russian participation in the senseless slaughter. The U.S. war in Indochina became difficult and eventually impossible for the U.S. to continue because (in addition to heroic Vietnamese resistance) the U.S. public had turned against the conflict and were expressing discontent in a variety of ways that disrupted the status quo. 

Conversely, if people are unaffected by or unaware of an injustice, they are unlikely to mobilize to end it. This is why the media’s choices in prioritization hold such dire consequences. The choice to give priority to the injustice perpetrated by enemy nations over crimes perpetrated by the U.S. cannot simply be dismissed as “bad journalism.” As Chomsky elaborated on the lack of coverage of East Timor in the 1970’s, “They [U.S. media] have real complicity in genocide in this case. The reason that the atrocities can go on, is because nobody knows about them. If anyone knew about them, there’d be protests and pressure to stop them.” The current disparity between the coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. backed Saudi war on Yemen accomplishes a similar effect, ensuring that the atrocities being perpetrated by a U.S. client (Saudi Arabia ) continue.  

A Note to the (correctly) Skeptical

Those who are (rightly) skeptical of the actual effect that US citizens can have on U.S policy might also be addressed with this dose of realism: Even if Americans’ ability to affect US policy is miniscule, it is certainly far greater than the capacity US citizens have to affect the government of another nation, (particularly one that is not a client of the US). 

Consider that Russian media’s coverage of the War in Ukraine has been (correctly) criticized as censorious and propagandistic. Now imagine that Russia outlets ceased to cover their government’s war in Ukraine entirely, while simultaneously giving overwhelming reportage, commentary, and analysis to the U.S. war on Yemen. In such a situation, any impartial person would conclude that Russian media would share in the culpability for the bloodshed continuing in Ukraine. Yet, a real parallel to this hypothetical situation exists in the U.S. media with its aforementioned lack of reporting on Yemen. Thus, the immiseration of the Yemeni people continues unabated and uncontested by a US public that might otherwise present a formidable barrier for their government’s barbarism. 

Understandable but Unproductive Manufactured Outrage

The current outpouring of US citizens’ support for Ukrainians and the demands for accountability for Russian actions are a product of nonstop U.S media spotlight on the issue.  Such sentiments come from an admirable desire to see the immense level of human suffering in the world reduced. That so much public outcry for the plight of Ukrainians has been so quickly manufactured is a further indictment of U.S media. It shows that they are totally capable of informing the public of ongoing tragedies. However, this ability to generate empathy and demands for justice is being utilized in the service of demonizing a geopolitical adversary of the U.S., rather than informing the U.S public about the atrocity that they have the greatest capacity to “treat;”  That is, of course, the human suffering caused by the U.S. government.

Applying the Triage Model of Media More Broadly

As discussed with the paired examples of the current tragedies in Ukraine and Yemen, the Triage Model of media would dramatically reorient how news is reported. This would be done by allocating coverage, emphasis & resources according to the aforementioned triage criteria. With triage applied in media, coverage or “treatment” would  be prioritized for:

  1. The situations with the most dire human consequences (or in medical terms-the most treatable severe injuries over less severe ones).

AND

  1. The human suffering that U.S or U.S clients are responsible for, and thus are most “treatable” by a U.S media audience (or in medical terms – those who can be saved over those who (sadly) are beyond current capacity to treat 

Incidentally, because  the U.S is the most powerful country with the greatest capacity for violence, the  criteria usually overlap. Such a reorientation in media priorities could significantly reduce human suffering in the world.  If the Triage Model were adopted, many events that rarely receive any media exposure currently would be prioritized for coverage. What follows are some of the crises which fit both triage criteria as they are some of the most dreadful emergencies on earth, and they are the most treatable by a U.S audience, as they are disasters created by U.S policy. 

An incomplete list of stories that would get triage priority would include: 

  • The U.S causing mass deprivation in Afghanistan: Since withdrawing from its 20 year war on the Afghan people in August of 2021, the U.S. has played the role of sore loser, imposing sanctions on the already poverty stricken nation. This is having the predictable result of mass starvation. As shown by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, U.S media has devoted barely any attention to this  U.S induced famine. This lack of coverage has persisted even as the situation has become one of the most dire crises on earth. Currently deprivation threatens to kill more Afghans than the recently ended 20 year U.S war, and the UN is characterizing the country as “hanging on a thread.” Such wording is appropriate given that some Afghans have resorted to desperate measures such as selling organs in order to feed their families.  It seems likely that the dearth of reportage  about this catastrophe emboldened President Biden to announce that the U.S would  steal billions of dollars from the Afghan Central Bank without fear of domestic opposition. The Triage Model of media would be hyper focused on this ongoing tragedy as it meets both criteria for treatment. It is simultaneously one of the most harrowing situations on earth, and one that is “treatable” as it is being actively perpetrated by the U.S. This coverage would encompass highlighting the stories of the Afghan victims along with regularly platforming experts from the UN and international aid organizations who are urging the U.S drop its sanctions on the already tortured Afghan people. Such a wide awareness would could render Biden’ plundering of the Afghan treasury politically suicidal.
Afghan civilians demonstrate against the man-made crisis they are facing [Source: thenaton.com]
  • Collective punishment of foreign populations: Long before the U.S. sanctions were causing mass suffering in Afghanistan, the policy of collective punishment already had a murderous track record. The devastation of economic warfare was seen in Iraq in the 1990’s, where U.S. sanctions caused the deaths of at least half a million children. While such costs were deemed to be acceptable by U.S. planners, two UN officials resigned in protest, referring to the policy as genocidal. Such misgivings apparently did not deter the U.S. government from continuing to use sanctions to ravage populations. Current U.S. sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, and Syria have caused misery and death for hundreds of thousands of people, disproportionately affecting the poorest and most vulnerable. Additionally, the asphyxiation of the Cuban economy by a U.S embargo has imposed intentional hardship on the population of the island nation for decades. Despite this track record, it is not uncommon for U.S media to report on turmoil in these countries without a single mention of crippling U.S. sanctions. Operating with the Triage Model, U.S. sanctions would be given constant and consistent coverage as they seem to have become the weapon of choice of the U.S. government. Rather than discussing sanctions as an alternative to war, they would be framed as the devastating form of warfare that they are. The framing would also extend past the question of “Do sanctions work?” to “Is it acceptable to destroy an entire society’s economy to achieve a political goal?” In the current Propaganda Model of media sanctions are often portrayed as a benign less damaging option to war when in reality they devastate millions of lives. The Triage model would expose this reality, seeking perspective and testimony from those victimized by U.S. economic warfare. Visits would be made to the poorest districts in Tehran to query residents about how U.S. induced inflation has affected their purchasing power for basic needs. Medical personnel in Caracas would be given airtime to speak to how shortages caused  have reduced their capacity to give life saving treatment.  International law experts would be platformed for the purposes of discussing the illegality of unilateral sanctions and collective punishment.  In short, under the Triage Model, Americans would be  aware of what sanctions actually do. If such awareness reached a critical mass, U.S. officials that propose sanctions would have to explain why they seek to starve and deprive millions of vulnerable people who pose no threat to the U.S. Such an argument would prove exceedingly difficult to make. 
  • U.S support for most of the world’s repressive governments: Amidst the current crisis in Ukraine, U.S officials and media pundits  have made bold pronouncements regarding concerns about democracy and human rights. Such statements go unchecked because U.S. media outlets rarely, if ever, inform their audiences that this rhetoric is not reflected in U.S.  policy. In reality, much of U.S policy is antithetical toward those aforementioned laudable concepts. Since the beginning of the Cold War a consistent aspect of U.S.  global strategy has been to provide support to some of the least democratic and most abusive regimes on the planet. This has included backing the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, the mass murdering Suharto regime in Indonesia, the kleptocratic Marcos autocracy in the Philippines, the despotic Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran, and the genocidal Ríos Montt junta in Guatemala. This trend of endorsing decidedly undemocratic governments that violate human rights on a massive scale continues to the present. As of 2021, the United States was providing military aid to 74 percent of the world’s dictatorships according to research conducted by Matthew Hoh, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. This support serves to prop up and maintain some of the world’s most repressive leaders, allowing them to continue to torment their domestic populations. Under the Triage Model of media, such a gap between the high minded rhetoric of U.S. officials and U.S. policy in practice would constantly be scrutinized. Officials would be consistently pressed to explain behavior that seems to counteract their claims of altruism. Actions such as arming the Saudi Arabian monarchy or the Israeli apartheid regime (as both governments repress their own citizens and wage war on neighboring nations) could become untenable under the weight of such obvious and exposed hypocrisy. Removing the global superpower’s backing from any of the dozens of authoritarian governments it currently supports would greatly reduce human misery. It would have the effect of making those governments more answerable to their populations as they would no longer have the luxury of Uncle Sam’s diplomatic, economic and military might looming in the background. The Triage Model of media could make such an outcome possible. 
  • The U.S role in crisis in Ukraine: Obviously there is U.S. media coverage of the war in Ukraine, but it is completely decontextualized. In the Triage Model, the media would emphasize U.S actions that have contributed to the present violence. This would include the three decades of NATO expansion up to Russia’s border. This was accomplished over the continued objections of Russia and in defiance of the advice of some of the most senior members of the U.S. national security state. Triage media would lend some analysis to the West’s 2008 decision to announce the intention to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, a scenario that Russian diplomats indicated was a “Red line.” Responsible reporting would also illuminate the 2014 U.S backed coup that overthrew Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich and led to a civil war wherein 14,000 people have been killed. Investigative resources would be apportioned to investigate U.S. arms deliveries to Ukraine with regards to weapons falling into the hands of Neo-Nazis (a notorious problem in Ukraine.) If U.S. citizens were actually informed of these realities, important discussions might transpire. For instance, Americans might question the utility of NATO expansion,or perhaps its very existence. There might be some real introspection with questions like, “How would the United States react were Russia to form a military alliance that included Mexico or Canada, with potential to place nuclear weapons on the U.S border?” With a public more informed of the facts, officials might have to explain why the U.S. and Ukraine were alone at the United Nations in their 2021 rejection of an anti-Nazi resolution. With 74 % of Americans apparently supporting confrontation with Russia that could result in nuclear war, it is needed now more than ever that the Triage Model be applied. Awareness and introspection is necessary for breaking through the simple manichean, good vs. evil portrayals of the conflict in Eastern Europe.

Those particular phenomena/events are some of the obvious places for  media to focus if they were oriented toward maximally reducing human suffering, as the Triage Model proposes. Additionally, as general practice U.S. media outlets would regularly devote investigative resources, reportage and commentary to a wide range of U.S./U.S. proxy inflicted harms that rarely receive coverage in the current model. 

This would mean regularly platforming victims of U.S. violence. Imagine how U.S public opinion might change if they were regularly confronted with grieving family members of children killed by a U.S airstrike. Contemplate how difficult it would become for U.S policy makers to continue to send arms to Israel if outlets gave ample time to cover the daily humiliations endured by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Picture the political backlash for Congress members who support the current war on Yemen if their constituency was constantly viewing the images of starving, dying Yemeni children. 

On the investigative end, outlets devoted to the Triage Model would apportion significant resources to determining the true human cost of U.S. policies. In our current model of corporate media there is a distinct lack of interest in determining the actual death toll of U.S. wars and other belligerent actions. This dearth of reporting is exemplified by the uncertainty of the total deaths from the 2003 U.S. war on Iraq, with estimates ranging anywhere from 200,000 to over two million killed. Even when reporting on civilian casualties occasionally emerges from mainstream outlets, it is often years after the fact. This exposure also typically portrays the killings as “errors” or results of “flawed targeting” rather than the predictable and repeated outcome of U.S. military actions. The U.S. atrocities that do grab mainstream attention are often incidents that could not possibly be ignored. This was the case with the August 2021 U.S. drone strike that killed an entire family in Kabul, Afghanistan. While this tragedy was correctly given media attention, it is worth noting that the massacre occurred at a moment when the U.S. was withdrawing from Afghanistan and the entire Western media was focused on Kabul. This coverage contrasts with the thousands of other incidents of Afghans being killed by U.S. forces in the less accessible rural regions of Afghanistan where the U.S. war was primarily focused. In one of the rare investigations into these deaths that U.S.  media did, journalist Anand Gopal discovered that in the rural regions, “On average… each family lost ten to twelve civilians.”  This revelation implies that the death toll from the U.S. war on Afghanistan is a staggering figure, but the victims are nearly invisible in US media.

US planners are apparently so confident that U.S. war crimes will not be investigated or reported on by the current media apparatus that they undercount or outright lie about civilian deaths. Under the Triage Model, no such confidence would exist. Alongside devoting significant investigative resources to inquiring about U.S. war crimes, a media devoted to triage would engage in other activities in service of exposing U.S. violence. This would include actively soliciting and encouraging leaks from inside the U.S. national security state, seeking classified documents and exposing them (with no redactions) to the public. Other ventures could include consistently hosting experts in international law to speak about the many violations of international law the U.S. engages in, specifically identifying U.S. officials who should be prosecuted. Attention could be focused on how the U.S. treats international organizations like the International Court of Justice, and International Criminal Court with contempt. Under the current media model, US criminality including blatant violations of the UN charter and Geneva Conventions, are treated as benign or at worst tragic mistakes. Adhering to the Triage model, U.S officials might actually fear being held accountable for their grievous crimes, an outcome that is distinctly out of the realm of possibility in the current media landscape. 

The U.S. Senate Torture Report, which details illegal CIA interrogation techniques, has not been released. The 525 page summary has been made public, but only with severe redactions. [Source: theintercept.com

A Call for Change Alongside a Recognition of Reality

To review, the Triage Model is a call to reorient U.S. media in such a manner that it results in significant reduction in human suffering on a global scale. The restructuring would require media coverage, resource allocation, and  investigative capacity to be prioritized according to two basic criteria. In this formulation, news would be prioritized with consideration to the degree of human consequence in combination with an assessment of the  degree to which a situation can be addressed  or “treated,” by the U.S.  audience.

This proposal of course requires going up against the very incentive structure of current U.S media. Tremendous obstacles are present in the form of corporate ownership of the media, the need for advertisers, the desire for access to government officials, along with a general shared class backgrounds between journalists and the very officials they should be investigating. One would not be wrong in concluding that US media will not change holistically until U.S. society goes through a radical shift from profit driven capitalism to human needs driven socialism.  

Despite the aforementioned barriers, there is hope that U.S. media can be changed. Throughout U.S history there have been media personalities that have operated in a manner that closely resembles the Triage Model, often at considerable risks to their own safety. One might consider the abolitionist publications such as David Walker’s Appeal and William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, both of which were published in a time where the levers of power in the U.S. were distinctly proslavery. (Walker paid for such actions with his life). Ida B Wells put her life on the line to expose the systemic racist terrorism of the Jim Crow South. We might also look to more recent history where journalists such as Seymour Hersh, Jeremy Scahill, and Julian Assange have revealed severe war crimes perpetrated by the most powerful government in the world. The Triage Model of media may be aspirational at the moment, but it has its roots in work that has already been done by people who faced considerably more danger than the reporters of the present era.  

Political commentator Michael Parenti once  noted, “No communication system can hope to report everything, so therefore selectivity is unavoidable. Now of course the press must be selective, but the question is what principle of selectivity is involved?” The Triage Model is an attempt to provide a “principle of selectivity” to media that is compatible with the themes of international harm reduction, perpetual expansion of empathy and continued demands for justice.