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MCP 14 (2) pp. 255–263 Intellect Limited 2018

International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics Volume 14 Number 2

© 2018 Intellect Ltd Commentaries. English language. doi: 10.1386/macp.14.2.255_7

AbigAil AdAms University of Edinburgh

selective sympathy?

Exploring western media bias

in the reporting of terrorism

Multiple bombings in Afghanistan, one lorry collision in Nice: is one of these more tragic than the other? The media’s reaction to 2016’s epidemic of Islamic State-claimed terror attacks revived criticism of a so-called ‘empathy gap’ (Graham 2015; Maketab 2016). The argument goes that attacks on non- western countries receive a muted response, while any disruption to a western city is considered an ‘attack on all of humanity’, to quote Obama’s remarks following the November 2015 Paris attacks (2015). This reveals the outrage of western audiences to be geographically dependent, or even, as many online commentators concluded, that nobody cares about Middle Eastern and African lives (Zhao 2015; Barnard 2015).

This argument is built from two premises: first, that media news cover- age is systematically unbalanced, and second, that this imbalance is wrong because the depth of coverage on a country reflects its perceived worth. This reasoning was used with greatest effect after the Bataclan killings in November 2015, when three armed gunmen opened fire on the crowd at a rock concert in central Paris, part of a series of ISIS-coordinated attacks on the city. Once news broke of the bombings, papers filled with analysis, iconic monuments lit up red white and blue (Taylor 2015) and Facebook released a Tricolour profile picture overlay (Feeney 2015). No such provisions, however, were extended to the 67 funeral goers attacked in Baghdad that same day (Al Jazeera 2015), or the 282 casualties from a suicide bombing in Lebanon just

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the day before the Bataclan shooting (Barnard 2015; Battah 2015). Although such observations are undoubtedly significant, there are several problems with the argument constructed using them: namely, that western audiences care more about attacks on western targets.

First, the hyperbolic delivery of this argument damages its credibility. The problem is epitomized by a tweet from Jack Jones, a YouTube personality, decrying how ‘No media has reported [the November 2015 Lebanon bombing]’ (@jackjonestv 2015), an absolutist phrasing also present in a Rolling Stone article on why terrorist attacks in Beirut are ‘ignored’ (Miller 2016). These inflammatory claims aim to secure wider discussion on the proportionality of news coverage, but the imposition of such a clear-cut narrative on a complex matter is a false representation of the situation and detracts focus away from the central issue of the terrorist attacks themselves.

Bold rhetoric such as ‘ignored by the media’ may be emotive and eye- catching but is also deceptive and misleading. On the media coverage side, BBC News, CNN, Al Jazeera or other such reputable outlets, for instance, must not be included in the world media in question, unless ignoring tragedies such as the Baghdad bombing somehow includes devoting headlines to it. Accusations of public apathy are products of a similar overstatement. There is an undeniable irony, for example, in the aforementioned Rolling Stone article, which lamented the absence of social media solidarity for victims of the twin suicide bombings carried out in a populous civilian neighbourhood of Beirut in 2015, being shared 37,335 times on Facebook alone (Muck Rack 2018). This demonstrates a high readership for an incident supposedly ‘barely noticed’ by the American public.

There is definitely room for an exploration of the level and quality of coverage of atrocities across the non-western world, but saying that there has not been any is neither accurate nor helpful in a debate that should be more nuanced than that. This matters because the prevalence of critiques purport- ing to identify an unacceptable East–West division conversely ends up perpet- uating such a division by entrenching it in the perceptions of their audience.

Notwithstanding overstatement, the claim that coverage of world events is minimal in scope and matter of fact in nature compared to the media frenzy that greets similar events in the western world does have a factual basis. After all, the Ramadan bombings – including an ISIS-claimed attack on a shop- ping centre in Baghdad’s Karrada district, which with almost 400 fatalities was 2016’s deadliest terror attack – were reported (Chou 2017). Yet it received a fraction of the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo shooting, which prompted a week’s worth of front pages, international marches and a social media solidar- ity campaign (ABC News 2015; Devichand 2016). A study into western media bias confirms this inconsistency to be part of a wider trend: in 2015, there were almost six times fewer articles written on incidents of terror in non-western countries than those in the western world (Darling-Hammond 2016).

Nevertheless, there is a need to explore the reasons behind this discrep- ancy, and in doing so, challenge one of the argument’s core assumptions: that world news is systematically side-lined by the media. ‘The media’ is itself a problematic term to use because it presumes the existence of one homoge- nous reporting body. Instead, as Susan Moeller (2006) confirms, ‘the media are not monolithic’ but a body made up of many outlets with differing briefs and target readerships. Within this spectrum, some organizations give more focus to European affairs, while others are dedicated to covering the Middle East, Asia or Africa, with little or no attention paid to European domestic politics.

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Although BBC.co.uk may have had more articles on the Tory leadership race than international news on its homepage, this is because the main focus of the British Broadcasting Company is what is happening in Britain. Al Jazeera, for example, or BBC Africa (as the name suggests) have very different priorities.

Although this distinction is important, it does not explain all geograph- ical discrepancies. Islamic extremism, after all, is a threat facing the world at large; therefore, the actions of IS and its affiliates should be priorities for all news organizations. An alternative explanation is that world news is covered, but is simply read less. This was the thesis proposed by Martin Belam (2015), a Guardian editor, in the wake of the 2015 attacks in Beirut and Paris. He writes, ‘to say that the media don’t cover terrorism attacks outside of Europe is a lie. They do. But […] if you look at your analytics, people don’t read them very much’. News agencies report breaking news of all terrorist attacks, irrespective of continent. However, for commercial news agencies, follow-up commentary is dictated by the interest of their readership.

The impact of what the public chooses to read is only increasing as websites, apps and social media surpass traditional media as young people’s primary source of news (Hiebert 2016). Whereas power previously rested with editors to rank stories, platforms such as Facebook’s ‘Trending Topics’ section use algorithms to configure a list of news topics experiencing a spike in ‘engagement’ (indicated by the number of shares and ‘likes’ gathered), effec- tively turning the categorization of news into an automated system. Whilst algorithms may appear to be a positive step in minimizing entrenched biases, they do not provide the neutrality that might be expected, and in fact, often replicate and amplify human prejudices. As sociologist Zeyneb Tufekci (2016) explains, Facebook and other such organizations are commercially led enterprises whose algorithms are set up to prioritize content that produces ‘engagement’ (and therefore advertising revenue) at the expense of less ‘like- able’ stories, thus turning an industry influenced by analytics into one entirely driven by them. Furthermore, whilst organizations such as Facebook and Google do not overtly discriminate in selecting news stories, their efforts to ‘personalize’ each user’s news experience by utilizing location, search history and previous social media activity filter down the potential list of news stories to those predicted to garner most interest (Osofsky 2016). The provision of these headlines at the exclusion of all others results in what Internet activ- ist Eli Pariser dubbed a ‘filter bubble’, whereby the articles most relevant to the reader become the only ones they see, perpetuating Eurocentric and other biases without their knowledge (Dewey 2015).

Further to establishing the existence of a coverage gap, critics argue that unbalanced news coverage is wrong because the number of articles on an inci- dent corresponds to how deeply people care about the lives of those involved. In many ways it is entirely natural that British media perceive public inter- est in the United Kingdom to be weighed towards Europe. As such, accusa- tions of an ‘empathy gap’ appear to utilize a falsely simplistic correlation (The Economist 2015).

For one, Western Europe is physically and ideologically closer to Britain, with countless historical, economic and cultural ties fostering a high degree of mutual understanding. Decades of political truce within Europe have only strengthened these links. As Z. Sardar (1999: 44) explains, the West exists as ‘a concept and a world-view’ as much as a geographical zone. Consequently, shootings at restaurants and concert halls in Paris can be condemned by David Cameron (2015) as an assault on ‘our way of life’. The Parisian lifestyle tacitly

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extends to the culture and values shared across the West and the Anglosphere (Greenslade 2015).

Thus, there is a stronger public reaction to European tragedies. However, visceral reactions are not confined to western misfortune, as was made abundantly clear by the case of Aylan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned attempting to flee his homeland (Smith 2015). Within hours of their publication, images depicting the toddler lying face down on the shores of Turkey were greeted with outpourings of outrage, a viral hashtag (BBC Trending 2015) and even a spike in donations to migrant aid organiza- tions (Mintz 2017). Such a response underpins the phenomenon of ‘psychic numbing’, whereby humans struggle to connect statistics with a proportional emotional reaction, instead requiring personal stories to galvanize compas- sion (Lifton 1982; Ropeik 2011). This tendency towards the individual over the many, regarded by psychologist Paul Slovic (2007) as a ‘fundamental deficiency in our humanity’, suggests that perceptions play a fundamental role in influ- encing intuitive reactions. When confronted with the humanity and pathos of the refugee crisis, the world did not hesitate in responding, but the avoidance of statistical apathy is dependent on not just knowledge of, but identification with the victims of tragedies. Unsurprisingly, this occurs more naturally within shared demographics (Krebs, cited in Pinker 2011). In this way, unfamiliarity rather than indifference is responsible for the imbalanced response to misfor- tune around the globe.

Another factor to consider is that terrorism in Europe produces more shock because it is less frequent. In the early twenty-first century, where terrorism is characterized by, if not synonymous with, Islamic extremism, several Muslim countries have been plagued by war and reactionary terrorism while Europe experiences a period of relative peace (Pinker 2011: 251, 351, 362). This is not to say that western powers have been inactive, but military engagement has overwhelmingly been directed towards intervention in Middle Eastern wars rather than conflict on European or American soil. To commentators such as Patrick Cockburn (2016), this involvement is not merely a demonstration of the relative instability of the Middle East, but a contributing factor, exac- erbating existing civil conflicts, sectarian strife, political fragility and socio- economic deprivation – all conditions commonly identified as ‘push’ factors in the development Islamic extremism (Jones 2017). In the face of recent scholar- ship investigating the root of this problem (Lister 2016; Kaplan 2016), it could be argued that analysis of western media reaction is a relatively peripheral topic. In fact, framing western media representation as the central issue only perpetuates the Eurocentric notion that the importance of international affairs is contingent on how the West, as the default yardstick of modernity and progress, portrays them (Sardar 1999: 44–63).

For comparison, consider Europe. Post-Second World War efforts to foster political and economic goodwill in forming the European Union led to decades of cooperation in a continent historically ravaged by competition, suspicion and war (Tsoukalis 2005: 170; van Rompuy 2012). Arguably only with Brexit and the rise of far-right politics in Europe, along with the election of the Trump administration in the United States, have division and instability re-entered the western political landscape (Cockburn 2016). In addition, although preven- tion of terrorism is not a headline-grabbing topic, European government organizations have played a central role in keeping European cities safe. In November 2015, for example, David Cameron revealed that British intelligence had stopped seven attempted terror attacks in a single year (Wilkinson 2015),

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and in July 2015, the assistant police commissioner Mark Rowley confirmed that up to 50 attempts had been foiled since the 7/7 bombings ten years earlier (Beake 2015). United States counterintelligence has played a similarly crucial role in reducing the domestic impact of Islamic extremism (Byman 2017). Despite increased awareness, suicide bombings in Western Europe and the United States remain statistically rare, accounting for just 0.3 per cent of inci- dents in the last decade (Global Terrorism Database). Moreover, when they do occur damage is usually effectively minimized – of the 36 fatal attacks on the West in 2016, 26 resulted in just one death (Chou 2017).

Turning to the Middle East and Africa, it is a vastly different landscape. A lack of political stability combined with the rise of extremist groups exploit- ing ethnic and religious grievances has made radicalization, civil war and acts of terror alarmingly common. In 2016, for instance, 71 per cent of deaths caused by terrorism were concentrated in just five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Syria (Chou 2017). Iraq is perhaps the most extreme case, witnessing such a large number of terrorism-related fatalities that it averages out to 33 per day (Chou 2017).

The regularity of attacks in Nigeria or Iraq does not make them any less tragic, but does mean that they produce less shock than a perceived violent interruption to an otherwise undisturbed European capital, a point corrobo- rated by an Iraqi analyst, Sajad Jiyad. Resident in Baghdad, Jiyad (2016) writes candidly about how each year since 2003 at least one person he knows has been killed or injured by bombings and of the inevitable ‘numbness’ that accompanies living in an environment where attacks are so unrelentingly frequent. The enormous reaction to the Bataclan or Brussels Metro attacks is easy to criticize, but it is imperative to view these attacks in context. As Adrian Gallagher (cited in Luxton 2016) explains, ‘Western Europe is safer now than it has been for decades’, a claim supported by the sharp drop in fatalities from terrorist attacks compared with the period 1970 to 1990 (START 2016). Accordingly, attacks in this area received a high volume and intensity of reac- tion because they form a salient exception rather than the norm.

However, the most important objection to the ‘nobody cares’ accusations is also the simplest: it is entirely unconstructive. Sympathy for different countries is not mutually exclusive and it is unhelpful to suggest that it is. Solidarity is arguably the only tool that ordinary citizens have to fight back against terror- ism, and if fear of unconscious bias results in reluctance to show sympathy, or the belief that to avoid ‘doing sympathy wrong’ it is better to do nothing at all, that tool is lost. Whilst criticism of Eurocentrism is undeniably valid, with a factual basis that confirms disproportionate coverage of terrorism in number and manner, the reasons behind this are more complex than a lack of empathy. Walter Cronkite once said that the job of the media is to ‘hold up the mirror – to tell and show the public what has happened’ (BBC 2009). Journalists must be mindful of the responsibility to hold up this mirror to the whole world, but this need not come at the expense of un-politicized mourn- ing for tragedies, western or otherwise.

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contRibutoR dEtAils

Abigail Adams is a student at the University of Edinburgh, studying towards a Masters of Arts in History. Previous to her degree, she worked at a youth-led development agency in Tanzania, and since returning to the United Kingdom has had first-hand experience in reporting on international affairs as part of the editorial team for Leviathan, Edinburgh University’s Journal of Politics and International Affairs.

Contact: Department of History, Classics, and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place, EH8 9AG Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Abigail Adams has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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