In the aftermath of the horrific terrorist violence in Paris on Friday night, a chorus of voices is now asking: where was the coverage of Beirut terrorist attacks the day before? Of attacks at a school in Kenya? Or a wedding near Baghdad? "The media," many concluded, was the problem. It values some lives over others. It fails to inform us equally, adequately, about the scope of human suffering around the world.
Those critics are right: We do have a media problem. But we also have an audience problem.
The problem with the American media — and when American critics are saying "the media," that's mostly what they mean — caring more about events that impact white Westerners has been well-explained elsewhere. The coverage of the Paris attacks illustrated, starkly, how shocked and appalled American papers of record are when terrorists attack a Western European city, but don't give the same front-page, five-column treatment to attacks in the rest of the world — like that in Beirut, Lebanon, where more than 40 people were killed by suicide bombers the day before 129 and counting were murdered in Paris (others are posting about "Kenya," by which they seem to mean the 147 people killed by al-Shabab terrorists at Garissa University — something that happened back in April, although many people seem to think it occurred last week). It's fair and valuable to criticize the uneven coverage, and it's impossible to disagree on the basic facts: American media routinely covers, in much more detail, events that happen in the U.S. and Europe. American media also routinely covers, in much more detail, events and issues that disproportionately impact white people and the wealthy. Our media routinely fails to give adequate attention to a slew of important stories, and what is deemed "important" falls along complex lines of racial, economic, and regional hierarchy.
But that's not the be-all and end-all of the problem. "The media" is not a free-floating entity, lording over a vast populace of mindless drones only able to see what the New York Times puts on its front page. In a media economy that today is largely online, media consumers matter more than ever. It is your reads, shares, clicks, engagement, and subscriptions that help to drive advertising revenue, which in turn dictates resources, which shapes coverage.
We live in a world now where no one wants to pay for news. Newspapers are struggling, and foreign bureaus have been shuttering for years. Many of the buzzy new media sites don't have foreign bureaus or even much original reporting from overseas (with a handful of notable exceptions, and good on them). Publications are increasingly dependent on freelancers abroad, who do their work for low pay, with virtually no institutional resources behind them, often at significant personal risk. To suggest that "no one" is reporting on Beirut, on Garissa, on Baghdad is an affront and an insult to the great many professionals who put their lives in jeopardy to do just that.
We complain that we don't see the reporting we want. But aside from an outraged Facebook status, many of us in the U.S. don't actually seem to want the kind of reporting we claim to value — we're overwhelmingly not paying to subscribe to the outlets that do good, in-depth reporting about places around the world. Aside from when tragedy strikes, we're not sharing articles on Beirut or a city we've never heard of in Kenya nearly as often as many of us are sharing pieces about Paris, or even 10 Halloween Costumes for Feminist Cats.
That's not because we're bad, selfish, or myopic people (although anecdotally, Americans do seem less interested in world events than many Europeans, or our neighbors up north and down south). Part of the issue is proximity — we naturally care more about events that are close to home and issues that more directly impact us. Media coverage reflects that, and to a degree, it should — it's why the local news station I grew up watching in Seattle will cover a murder in that city, but probably not one in Miami. Paris resides closer to the collective (or average) American psyche than Beirut or Garissa. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, I saw dozens of people on Facebook and Instagram post photos of themselves in that city. Far fewer, I'm guessing, would be able to post a tourist photo in Beirut; almost none could pull up a picture of themselves in Garissa. More Americans have been to Paris, have read novels set in Paris, have dined at French restaurants or sipped French wine or watched French films, have maybe fantasized about seeing the Eiffel Tower one day, than have had similar connections with Lebanon or Kenya. That isn't true for every single American in our increasingly diverse country, but as a simple numbers game, many more Americans feel a personal connection to France. That connection, that closeness, is reflected in media coverage — both because creators of that coverage are also human beings, many of whom naturally care more about places that feel close than places that feel far, and because consumers of media overwhelmingly care more, read more, and share more about places to which they have a relationship.
There's also the fact that surprise is an element of newsworthiness. To use the old adage, "dog bites man" is not a story; "man bites dog" is. After more than a decade of U.S. military presence in Iraq and near-daily killings, bombings, assassinations, shootings, and explosions, a day on which a suicide bombing and roadside blast killed 26 is not front-page news. A terrorist attack that kills more than 100 in a city that is not a war zone and hasn't been one at any point in the living memories of the vast majority of Americans, is.
There are only so many hours in a day to read and share news. Empathy is not a finite resource, but it's a well-documented psychological phenomenon that we care more about a single noteworthy event — a terrorist attack in Paris — than an ongoing but equally (if not more) tragic one, like, say, the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has lasted about two decades and killed as many as 6 million people and earned the country a reputation as the rape capital of the world, or the plight of South Sudan, the world's youngest country, where ongoing conflict means that more than 2 million people are still refugees.
Is that because American media and political elite have concluded that, at the end of the day, the bodies of Europeans and Americans matter more than the bodies of Arabs and Africans? Yes. The nauseating reality is that we live in a world where many lives, especially if they are black or brown or don't hold a U.S. or an E.U. passport, are considered largely disposable. But when it comes to coverage of these events, it's not just that. And to reduce today's complex media reality to, basically, "All Lives Matter," is to flatten it beyond recognition and make it more difficult to fundamentally change. It also conveniently shields media consumers from any liability.
Right now, there is not a viable model to make good journalism totally sustainable. Reporters are underpaid and under-resourced. Editors are overworked and learning to balance their professional responsibilities of good and responsible storytelling and truth-finding with new market demands of ad revenue, shareability, and social media attention. There are many more outlets to compete with online, many drawing large audiences by piggybacking off the work of outlets that do invest in real journalism, or convincing advertisers that the valuable Millennial audience cares more about digestible content than coverage that is serious, deep, and thoughtful (and judging by the metrics, they're not totally wrong). Add to that a toxic mix of tragedy-exhaustion and Internet outrage culture: American troops are engaged in a conflict so long it's been deemed the "forever war," and one that keeps reaching its tentacles across new borders. Readers are apathetic, not particularly moved by death and destruction in much of the world, but eager to jump on perceived misdeeds by "the media." Activism is often pared down into digestible bits of "raising awareness" or "showing solidarity" — changing a Facebook photo, wearing a whatever-color ribbon or T-shirt, dumping an ice bucket on your head, using an evocative hashtag — which conflates fleetingly caring about something with actually understanding it, let alone doing anything.
Attention, awareness, and outrage are not nothing, but they also can't be everything. Many readers say they want better from "the media," but their actions — not to mention their pocketbooks — tell a very different story.
If American readers want better media coverage, that is wonderful, and perhaps Paris will be a wake-up call to subscribe to (and not just browse for free) publications that are doing the kind of substantive reporting they want to see, and to read and share those articles widely. Some readers are already doing that. But many others seem to think that "the media" has nothing to do with them. Media outlets surely shoulder most of the responsibility for lopsided coverage. But as readers take them to task, it's also worth a moment of reflection to ask: Do I read the world section of newspapers, or magazines with a global focus? Do I regularly share those stories? Do I do what I can to financially support the individuals who take enormous risks to bring these stories onto my laptop? Do I read about faraway places even when they aren't the locus of violence or conflict or tragedy? Do I pay to subscribe to publications that I think are doing valuable work? A Facebook status is easy. A sustained commitment to supporting better media coverage is a bigger challenge.
I write this from Indonesia, where massive forest fires are destroying enormous parts of the country and coating many areas in a dense, noxious haze. The pollution could create long-term health problems for many of the people who live here and nearby, and is already the cause of half a million respiratory illnesses. Small-scale farmers are seeing their crops wiped out, and the environmental and economic devastation could impact the country for years to come. The fires put wildlife in peril, with a third of the world's orangutan population now at risk of dying. Things have gotten better in the past few days because it finally rained, but the problem is not yet solved. There are, in fact, journalists here who are covering the fires and the haze. The story is not on the front page of Western newspapers or websites, but while it should absolutely be getting more coverage, it's not invisible — you just have to open up the pages or click on through.
Have you read about it?
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