John Diaz: On what’s news, and who decides.
O ne of my pet peeves is people who complain about stories being ignored or covered up by the mainstream media ... assuming if they missed it, then the mainstream media must have missed it.
The terrorist attacks in Paris brought out such conspiracy theorists in droves.
Social media went wild with tweets such as the one by Jackjonestv — retweeted more than 57,000 times — that showed a photo of a Nov. 12 bomb blast in Beirut accompanied by his comment: “No media has covered this, but R.I.P. to all the people that lost their lives in Lebanon yesterday from ISIS attacks.”
No doubt, many of his 86,000 followers accepted his premise that the mainstream news media missed the story. Who knows how many of them saw the conclusions of independent fact-checkers that the photo in question was from a 2006 Israeli strike on Hezbollah?
This is how information flows on social media: quickly and with neither context nor accountability. More than one Millennial has told me: “If it’s important, it will come to me” on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or other social networks.
It’s an illusion for those whose newsfeed assignments and algorithms skew toward the fun and trivial.
In truth, various major news organizations covered that Beirut bombing, which killed 43, and The Chronicle ran a nearly 400-word version of the New York Times account on Nov. 13.
In almost every case when you see a rant about a story the “mainstream media ignored,” the origins of the critic’s discovery of the supposedly suppressed story was ... mainstream media, even if it did not show up on his or her Facebook news feed.
The more nuanced issue — which has arisen after the Paris attacks — is why some acts of terrorism draw so much more attention than others.
“It seems we lack consistency when it comes to expressing sympathy to victims of terror and are probably swayed too easily by international and social media coverage,” Gus Elmashni of Redwood City wrote in a thoughtful letter that asked for an explanation of why the massacre in Paris received such disproportionate attention.
Elmashni pointed out that nearly as many civilians died in a “just as disturbing and horrific” attack at a Kenyan college in April and even more died in the 2008 slaughter in Mumbai at the hands of Islamic extremists.
“Isn’t Mumbai also a major international city?” he wrote. “I don’t see any differences in those attacks besides the fact that people of different ethnicity perished.”
All good observations and fair points.
There is no doubt that the American media, and its audiences, react differently to nearly identical events on the basis of proximity. Rightly or wrongly, a massacre in Paris is of greater interest and concern to Americans for several reasons.
The city is familiar to many who have traveled there. At least until recently, it’s been relatively sheltered from terrorist activity, which amplified the shock — and, thus, the news value — of the attacks.
Also, the complexity and audaciousness of the plot on a Western European nation suggested a new level of offensive for the Islamic State and, inevitably, concerns that it might be headed to the United States.
None of this is to dismiss Elmashni’s point that all lost lives are of equal value. Behind each number of the casualty count are friends and loved ones whose lives are forever shattered.
But proximity is a factor in news decisions. Think about it: A car burglary or home fire that may seem like a minor blotter item if it happened across town would be of intense interest if it occurred on your block.
Social media do not drive these newsroom decisions — after all, the Beirut coverage was there, even if it did not dominate the radar — but they corroborate the judgment that proximity, context and portent matter.