Are Some Terrorism Deaths More Equal Than Others?
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Version 0 of 1. KELLY VAUGHAN of Brooklyn, a Times reader, lived in Istanbul for a year, and so has followed the media coverage of the violence in Turkey with great interest. She wrote to me last week after the terrorist attacks in Brussels with a concern: “I can’t help but wonder why The Times is naming the individual victims of the Brussels attacks, and profiling at least some of them, when the same was not done (as far as I can find)” for the victims in Ankara and Istanbul, she wrote. This was also the case, she noted, “in other world cities,” whether “the violence was in Lebanon, Mali or Kenya.” Ms. Vaughn said she was able to imagine a number of reasons for this discrepancy, “some of which feel more legitimate than others.” She asked “how The Times decides how to cover these similar tragedies in such different ways.” Many others raised similar concerns. Richard Greenberg, also of New York, wrote: “Why did the N.Y.T. devote so much less coverage to the Ivory Coast terror attack from just last week, in which 16 people were killed, including both Africans and Europeans?” And Theodore Glasser, a communications professor at Stanford University, put it succinctly: “ISIS kills 30+ in Brussels: Big story, page 1. ISIS kills 30+ in Baghdad, small story, page 6, below the fold. What does this tell us about newsroom biases?” On Twitter, Krishnan Viswanathan wrote (and I’m translating from his abbreviated Twitterese): “Western terrorism victims get humanized with individual profiles but not victims from Asia/Africa events? What gives? Resource allocation?” I asked similar questions myself last year, in a column comparing the Times coverage of the attacks on Paris with the coverage of a terrorist attack on Nigeria. And The Times itself has more than once explored the subject of disparate media attention to terrorist victims. Last November, the Beirut bureau chief, Anne Barnard, wrote a perceptive piece titled “Beirut, Also the Site of Deadly Attacks, Feels Forgotten.” Ms. Barnard reported that many Lebanese deeply resented the difference between how the world reacted to a double-suicide attack in Beirut that killed more than 40 people and the Paris attacks that came a day later: “The implication, numerous Lebanese commentators complained, was that Arab lives mattered less. Either that, or that their country — relatively calm despite the war next door — was perceived as a place where carnage is the norm, an undifferentiated corner of a basket-case region.” (That piece, Ms. Barnard told me last week, “went viral, by orders of magnitude more than anything else I’d ever written.” She believes it revealed “the incredible, untapped readership possibilities out there” — people who want to see themselves and their lives reflected and taken seriously by the Western media.) And last month, The Times produced a video called “Forgotten Victims of Terror” that asked searching questions about why, for example, the United States government flew its flag at half-staff after Brussels but not after similar attacks in Turkey, Ivory Coast and elsewhere. But does The Times itself always tell the stories of terrorist victims with complete fairness? I don’t think it does. And neither does the international managing editor, Michael Slackman, who told me in an interview last week that this is a goal The Times strives for, but sometimes fails to accomplish. “We need to do a better job of not allowing ourselves to become callous to the human toll of repeated terror attacks,” Mr. Slackman said. “There is always a human cost, and that cost is the same wherever it happens.” Mr. Slackman mentioned that one of The Times’s handful of top-ranking editors, Susan Chira, a former foreign correspondent and foreign editor herself, is “always pushing us hard” to tell the stories of victims, wherever they are. And, he said, foreign correspondents have made it their (often difficult) life’s work to “bear witness” and tell the human story. He pointed out that The Times did that admirably in its coverage of Ebola. So why the persistent inequality that readers rightly observe? Part of the answer is access. It’s far easier to get a large number of staff members to Paris or Brussels than, for example, to Pakistan — a country that expelled the Times correspondent Declan Walsh in 2013. (Brussels, the capital of the European Union, is already brimming with international journalists.) Another factor is deployment of resources: The Times has more than a dozen staff correspondents working in bureaus in Western Europe; far fewer, for example, are based in Africa. And there is a legitimate question of newsworthiness. News is, by definition, something out of the ordinary. In some places, like Iraq, the tragic has become commonplace. “Terrorism is becoming less surprising, unfortunately,” said Mr. Slackman, a former Times correspondent in Egypt. Not too many years ago, he said, a bombing in Cairo would have been “a shock — and it would have been covered.” No longer: “We can’t cover every attack there.” In addition, the relationship between the United States and the country where an attack takes place is a factor. France, after all, is one of America’s chief allies, and so what happens there carries extra weight. And, as Ms. Barnard put it, the Brussels attacks raised the question, after Paris, of “whether this is the new normal for Europe.” All of these elements — journalistic access, deployment of resources, and the admittedly subjective idea of what’s newsworthy — are very real. But with a little soul-searching, editors may find that they can come up with a new, more evenhanded approach to covering a problem that, sadly, is not going away. As The Times becomes ever more global in its reach and its ambitions, the question of how it covers human tragedy worldwide will take on greater significance. And confronting its own cultural biases will become not just a journalistic imperative but a business one. I’m glad that Times journalists recognize the need to reflect the importance of all human life lost to terrorism — whether it happens in a place where we Americans may have gone sightseeing, or one we will probably never set foot in. And regardless of whether the victims seem “like us.” Because, in fact, they surely are. And it’s part of The Times’s journalistic mission to help its readers not only know that intellectually, but feel it in their hearts. |