Why So Much News Coverage of Paris, but not Beirut? Maybe it's Time to Look in the Mirror.

There’s a lot of discussion going on about why the ISIS attacks in Paris received so much North American media attention, but the ISIS attack in Beirut a day earlier go so little.

One common theme is that people who are not white just don’t matter—it’s because of racism. I don’t think that’s the case. 

The media uses a variety of factors to determine what to cover each day. Proximity is a key one. This is also known as the local angle. 

The local angle is why a car crash that kills nobody on a main street in your city or town leads the news, but a bombing in Baghdad gets no attention at all.

After all, you might want to travel on that road—it affects you. The bombing in Baghdad won’t alter your daily routine.

Plus, you might know people involved in the car crash. Chances are remote you know anyone hurt or killed in bombing so far away.

How does that relate to the Paris and Beirut attacks? 

Paris might not be proximate in terms of geography, but it is close in terms of our thoughts, plans, ideas, books we read (A Tale of Two Cities, Les Miserable). Can you name one book or movie about Beirut?

Plus, there's a better chance you will go to Paris, or know someone in Paris, than Beirut.

Then there’s the basic news test: Is it new? Is it different than normal? Unusual? Out of the ordinary?

When it comes to bombings and attacks in Beirut, the answer is no; it is not unusual.

There have been 59 significant attacks and bombings in Lebanon since 2004, not to mention various civil conflicts. There have been 14 in France in the same time period.

It sounds callous, and I mean no disrespect for the many harmed by attacks in Lebanon. But violence of this type is more common in Lebanon than France, and therefore less potentially newsworthy.

Those are all factors. But a main reason why we got more news about Paris than Beirut is us, the media consumers.

Reporters have known forever that international news is of less interest to readers, viewers and listeners than local news, sports and arts and life.

For a long time, it was hard for them to quantify this knowledge. But the Internet has solved that problem. 

Now they can know day-by-day and hour-by-hour what stories resonate with media consumers.

Stats from my hometown newspaper back this up; a snapshot of website visits for one month in 2014 show that the most visited sections were local, sports, arts & life, opinion, Canada, business, world.

Local, at 2.9 million visits, was over seven times more popular than world news at 396,059. Arts & Life was three times more popular.

Today, an editor recently said, Miss Lonely Hearts, the romance columnist, is more popular than most other parts of the newspaper, except for the local hockey team.

The media isn’t stupid; they aren’t going to publish stories people don’t want. And advertisers won’t pay top dollar to be on pages that few people visit.

In other words, we get the media we want, and maybe that we deserve.

As a panel the Columbia School of Journalism put it, as reported in the book News Prism: Challenges of Digital Communication (2012):  

“There is a crisis in international news reporting in the United States—and not one that should simply be blamed on the reporters, the gatekeepers, or the owners. We know there is stagnation, and even shrinkage, in the number of international stories in the media . . . but the primary reason for this decline is an audience that expresses less and less interest in the  international stories that do appear.”

In the 1960s, reporters at a major U.S. network put it more cynically with what they called the “Racial Equivalence Scale.”

The scale showed the minimum number of people who had to die in plane crashes in different countries before the crash became newsworthy. One hundred Czechs was equal to 43 Frenchmen, and the Paraguayans were at the bottom.”

(BBC journalists had a similar scale, in which “one thousand wogs, 50 frogs and one Briton” were equivalent.)

Not in real life, of course; the death of anyone is a terrible. But in terms of reader interest, that's how it often works.

Of course, there are other factors—the political significance of the country in question (there was more reporting about Iraq in the U.S. during its war against that country), its economic impact (especially if it has oil), or if there are strategic military concerns.

Sometimes complexity can also militate against coverage. Lebanon, with all its competing militias, militaries, political parties, religions and ideologies is very hard to report about and understand.

Good guys versus bad guys is much easier to report about—and read about.

(Of course, if a celebrity is involved, then anything that happens anywhere can be newsworthy.)

This doesn’t excuse the media. But it does begin to explain the difference in coverage of Paris and Beirut.

One more thing: If the lack of media coverage about Beirut bothers you, or the lack of coverage from any other of the world’s hotspots, then tell your local media outlets. 

And also make sure to click on those stories on their websites.

For more on this topic, read my post Why Audiences Say They Like Vegetables but Eat Candy.