Posts Tagged ‘Jim Naureckas’
ISIS Killed More Americans in Beirut (Borj Barajneh) attacks than in Paris: Role of Hometown papers to spread the news
Posted on: November 24, 2015
ISIS Killed More Americans in Beirut Than in Paris: Role of Hometown papers to spread the news
The debates continue over whether last week’s ISIS terror bombing in Beirut was undercovered by the media or just unappreciated by an uninterested public — even though, as Jim Naureckas pointed out on Tuesday, US news outlets overwhelmingly skewed their coverage toward the next day’s mass killings in Paris, in quantity, placement and level of sympathy for the victims, not just in number of Facebook shares.
(As of this morning, the New York Times had run 130 stories mentioning Paris and terror attacks since November 13, versus 20 mentioning Beirut — with much of the Paris coverage being front-page news, while Beirut was mostly relegated to brief mentions deep within the paper—often in articles that were primarily about the Paris violence.)
Habib Battah shared this link
“…as David A. Graham put it in The Atlantic (11/16/15), “People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.” When the media pick and choose who is considered “ourselves,” little wonder that readers end up caring more about some victims than others.”
As the Village Voice (11/18/15) noted, the only major US news outlet to report on the three deaths was the Detroit News (11/13/15), which ran the story on page one.
(Dearborn is a heavily Lebanese-American suburb of Detroit.)
The death of Cal State Long Beach student Nohemi Gonzalez in the Paris terror attacks, by contrast, received widespread attention, including multiple mentions on television news (CBS Evening News, 11/15/15, 11/16/15; NBC Nightly News, 11/14/15, 11/15/15, 11/16/15; CNN, 11/14/15, 11/15/15, 11/16/15, 11/17/15).
None of this, it should go without saying, takes away from the horror of the loss of Gonzalez, or for that matter of the 128 Paris dead who weren’t American.
But it’s hard to truly mourn a stranger unless you can hear their story, and put yourself in their shoes — as David A. Graham put it in The Atlantic (11/16/15), “People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.”
When the media pick and choose who is considered “ourselves,” little wonder that readers end up caring more about some victims than others.
is a contributing writer for FAIR, and runs the stadium news website Field of Schemes
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