Which global events matter to the media?

On November 12, 2015, two suicide bombings struck Bourj al-Barajneh, one of Beirut’s busiest commercial streets, killing 43 people and wounding at least 200 more. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed responsibility for the attacks. These were the deadliest bombings since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990.

Twenty-four hours later, five coordinated terrorist attacks erupted throughout Paris, hitting concert halls, stadiums, and restaurants. At least 130 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded in what is considered the bloodiest attack on French soil in decades. Islamic State (IS) militants were also behind the attack.

I was on the phone with my friend the other day. I told him that I was attempting to compare both attacks and the amount of attention they both received.

“What Beirut attack?” he asked, confused.

I wasn’t surprised by his question, because I believe that his reaction reflects a broader trend. Over the years, it has almost become a predictable pattern. One disaster, whether natural or man-made, overshadows another. The public is captivated by the now; it’s the natural cycle of news coverage. But for many, this becomes a problem when the overshowing happens because of where the attack takes place. Indeed, attacks in the “West” seem to capture the attention and concern of Americans in a way that similar atrocities elsewhere don’t seem to do.

There’s no denying that the shootings and bombings which struck Paris quickly subsumed most of the attention that might have been directed towards Beirut. Immediately after the raids, most Facebook users were notified that their “friends” living in Paris were “identified as safe.” The social media outlet also gave its users the option to filter their profile picture with a faded French flag, a sign of visual solidarity.

Both attacks were the deadliest in decades and were committed by the same perpetrators from the outside, but only Paris received a global outpouring of sympathy – the #PrayForParis hashtag resonated around the world, the French flag dominated internet, presidential speeches touted the need to defend “shared values.”

I wasn’t notified that my “friends” in Beirut were “identified as safe.” I had to contact them to find out (granted, founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has since told Time magazine that the website only decided to implement non-natural disaster notifications after the Paris attack).

In Lebanon, people are lamenting how quickly the Beirut attacks fell into oblivion. On Twitter, enraged users deplore “All this anger over the Paris attacks, but none over the dead children in Lebanon!” or “What about Beirut?!” Lebanese journalists and commentators are accusing international news companies of portraying French lives as more “media worthy.” Beirut feels forgotten, and perhaps rightfully so. But is there really anyone to blame?

It’s safe to assume that if American news organizations had the devoted the same amount of resources to Beirut than they had to Paris, readers, watchers, and listeners would probably not have paid as much attention.

In the case of Beirut, most press companies referred to a “Hezbollah stronghold” being bombed; in Slate, “Dozens Killed in Bombing Targeting Hezbollah Stronghold”; in the New York Times, “Deadly Bombing in Beirut Suburb, a Hezbollah Stronghold”; in The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal, the neighborhood is portrayed as a “bastion for the Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah.” Very little detail was given regarding the mosque and bakery in which the explosions occurred, and even less on the victims.

According to Nadine Ajake, a reporter for The Atlantic, the problem is that with the words “Hezbollah stronghold,” the attacks are framed as retaliatory or even expected – “another episode in the sage of warring Mideast factions.” This has a strong impact on the average American reader, who will most likely be more interested by terrorism in Europe than by ongoing civil conflicts in the Middle East.

The headlines in Paris’s case reflected a deeper sentiment of alarm and terror. The New Yorker announced “Terror Strikes in Paris”; both the New York Times and the Economist headlined “Terror in Paris,” a simple, poignant combination of words that makes the heart skip a beat. Media outlets did not relate to the ethnic or religious makeup of the place attacked, but rather to the feeling that humanity had been stripped away from an entire city.

Here’s the opening paragraph of a story which was featured in the New York Times: “[…] Then came the sharp, unmistakable crack of an explosion, overwhelming the roar of the crowd. A stunned moment passed. Players and spectators seemed confused, and eventually the awful realization swept through the stadium: Terror, for the second time this year, had struck Paris.”

The tones used to cover both stories were strikingly dissimilar: in one hand, there were objective, almost scientific depictions of what took place; in the other, emotional accounts and even anecdotes that humanized the story.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BEls740Qb2p/

 

But the tones are justifiable. The attacks meant different things in Paris and Beirut. “Paris saw it as a bolt from the blue, the worst attack in the city in decades, while to Beirut the bombing was the fulfillment of a never entirely absent fear that another outbreak of violence may come,” wrote Anne Barnard in the New York Times.

Numerically, Paris had also suffered a deadlier attack. Three times more people had lost their lives in Paris. France also does not suffer from chronic armed civil-conflicts, while Lebanon has been dealing with an internal war between the Sunni militants and the Shiite Hezbollah militia for years. Though it had been relatively calm in the past year in a half, the conflict had already been the source of innocent deaths.

The public’s reaction, too, is justifiable. Historically, Americans have always been more interested by domestic and European affairs. There’s a cultural tie between the United States and the European “West,” an innate solidarity, that explains why the Paris raids, among other stories, were followed with more widespread attention. It’s this “cultural proximity” that dictates how news pieces are framed and published.

However genuine are those who lament “parochialism,” they’re fighting against an elemental part of human nature; we are innately biased, orientated towards what we can relate to. There’s a tribal or racial component to this familiarity factor that make us inclined to subjectivity – we tend to perk up when we see ourselves in the victim. Our fondness for what is geographically or culturally “close” is embedded within us.

 

“We are programmed to be more concerned about [those who are more like us],” wrote Faine Greenwood in “The Battle of Who Could Care Most.”

Greenwood added: “It is far easier to imagine ourselves being shot in our office downtown or blown to pieces on a subway than it is for us to imagine being kidnapped by rebels in a Nigerian forest or succumbing to Ebola in the slums of Liberia.”

Americans are much more likely to have been to Paris than Beirut or any other city in the Middle East or Africa. Even if they haven’t, they at least know of it via movies, TV shows, or history lessons. Naturally, the resurgent attacks in Paris brought the issue of Islamic terrorism to the forefront of American consciousness once again. Traumatic experiences like 9/11 or the Boston Marathon bombing have pushed Americans to consider disasters in the Western world with the prism of their own anxiety.

This is not to say that they don’t care about Middle Eastern or African incidents. The Joseph Kony campaign in 2012 generated worldwide compassion and solidarity – its video was viewed by hundreds of millions around the world in less than a week. The abduction of over 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria two years ago stimulated an enormous public campaign to bring them back. Officials insist that efforts to free the girls have not been abandoned.

But attacks in Third World countries don’t stimulate the same apprehension as attacks in Paris do, simply because they occur more frequently. Americans tend to group those regions as places where violence is predominant. There’s a growing concept of “empathy fatigue,” stemming from the frequency at which terrorism has hit these regions. Even those who really do want to make a difference have a hard time keeping up with all the attacks.

 

In Africa, for example, consistent attacks across the Sub-Saharan regions have seen a massive jail break at Bauchi, an infant suicide-bombing in northeastern Nigeria, a massacre in Baga – the list goes on. Though up until now, Africa was thought to be immune to the call of Islamic extremism and militancy, militant groups like Boko Haram have quickly emerged as the deadliest and most resurgent front of global jihadism, killing innocent civilians every day.

“The frequency [of the attacks] makes the news of terrorism in those regions a lot less shocking and captivating for the ‘West’,” argued Neil Miller, professor of journalism at Tufts University. “Iraq was a disaster. Syria’s an ongoing mess. Nigeria’s under constant attack. There’s simply so much happening in the Middle East and Africa that it makes it hard to follow.”

Unlike President François Hollande, who responded to the Paris attacks with decisiveness, African governments are doing little to contain the violence generated by these Islamic militants. Corruption and governmental indifference, which has plagued these regions for years, lie at the heart of the debate. According to Matt Schiavenza, author of “Nigeria’s Horror in Paris’s Shadow” published in The Atlantic, the lack of effective government policies orientated towards the treatment of terrorism in African countries has real impacts on the way news is written and received.

In a video released by the New York Times last March, an Ivorian woman explained that the discrepancy in international attention stemmed directly from Africa, not American news companies. She argued that, in contrast with the cultural unity of the Western world, there’s very little regional solidarity in Africa. This implies that even news companies of the neighboring countries aren’t that responsive to attacks anymore.

“We’re always waiting for people to come sympathize and talk about us,” she said. “But if we don’t try to speak up about what’s happening to us, of course others won’t be interested. Even African countries aren’t talking about the attacks that happened [in Ivory Coast].”

And that’s an important point, because it’s becoming increasingly difficult for American news outlets to cover stories in dangerous, remote parts of the world. The declining profitability of journalism due to the emergence of easily-accessible free news has pushed companies such as The Boston Globe to cut back on foreign-reporting investments. Sending reporters in Nigeria’s northeast, dominated by Boko Haram, or in Syria, where the civil war has already claimed nearly 200,000 lives, is extremely expensive. The constant costs of replacing damaged material, hiring security personnel, and finding places to stay have become a significant burden in this low-profit industry. This means that fewer journalists are actually on ground to witness these disasters.

Some institutions, like Time magazine, BBC, or The Tribune, actually do invest extensive amounts of resources on foreign investigation and tragedy coverage; the New York Times has a photojournalism section dedicated to documenting tragedies around the world. But these outlets, too, have to prioritize on what sells. “News” is flowing in all the time, it’s part of the social media phenomena and the 24-hour news cycle. Everyone’s writing about the same news, so they all have to find ways to captivate their readers. Their headquarters are located in Western cities like New York, London, or Paris, and their main audience is located there too. If consumers in those cities were as interested in reading about Lebanon as reading about Paris, tragedy coverage would certainly be more equal. But they aren’t, and that’s why these institutions can’t focus too much of their reporting on stories that the audience won’t fully engage with and relate to.

Attacks in cities like Paris receive more attention because that’s precisely what news is; something particularly unusual or unforeseen, something that will hook readers. It’s not that news outlets don’t talk about what’s happening in Third World countries – the articles are out there, they’re just not featured on the front page or dramatically headlined. Paris received a particular outpouring of attention and sympathy because France had experienced very few threats of Islamic terrorism before 2015. Regions like Lebanon or Nigeria, on the other hand, had suffered from hundreds of attacks already.

All lives are equally innocent, but it’s hard to comprehend or empathize with calamities happening a world away, especially when they occur on a regular basis.