Places the media won’t go: How Paris vs Beirut is not mere nitpicking

It was early 2013, and the memory of December 16, 2012, was still burning in most minds. Which is why what activist and writer Kancha Ilaiah said at a session at the Jaipur Literature Festival — “Young Adult’s Workshop: Myself, My World – A search for identity” — didn’t resonate with the crowd of young students present.

Ilaiah said something to the effect that Delhi and its media outraged about the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh but couldn’t care less about the countless Dalit women who meet the same fate far from city lights.

No need to congratulate yourselves over your spontaneous protests in metropolitan India.

Hushed whispers of disapproval went around the room: Is he trying to say we shouldn’t grieve for “Nirbhaya” just because certain incidents somewhere escaped our (the media’s) attention?

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Indeed what Ilaiah said has become de rigueur in the season of whataboutery and wherewereyouwhenery. It’s become difficult to grieve, protest or outrage without someone, somewhere pointing us to a previous event for which we haven’t grieved, protested or outraged.

9/11 was bad but what about Afghanistan; Charlie Hebdo was gruesome, but Nigeria was worse; you cry for Peshawar, but weren’t moved by 26/11; and the latest – Paris was terrible, but why ignore Beirut and Baghdad?

In a series of tweets, American writer JamilesLartey christened such people “tragedy hipsters” and stated that “you can raise attention to unconsidered suffering without guilting and judging people for being upset by the wrong things”.

Several articles have come out in the Indian media detailing reasons why Paris mourners should not be judged. There’s this one in DailyO:

Paris is a symbol of freedom, liberty and democracy. It’s been listed as the top tourist destination in the world with 33 million tourists annually and half of them are foreign born.

Beirut has been a war zone for decades with civil conflicts between the government, the rebels and the Islamic State. Bloodshed is expected and is inevitable.

And there’s this in Huffington Post:

I think it’s moving if Mumbai’s train station is lit up in red white and blue now whether or not Paris’ Gare du Nord turned saffron white and green in 2008.

Articles in Vox and Medium have responded to the “white-lives-matter-more” narrative making the point that it is the reader that has chosen to ignore the media coverage on Beirut and Bagdad.

To be sure, given that terror acts in Paris, Beriut and Bagdad unfolded around the same time, the question being asked raises specific editorial concerns. The point of a lot of the angry criticism post-Paris was not really about no coverage but not enough coverage and the tonality.

Lebanese journalist Habib Battah writing in Al Jazeera notes:

Buried deeper in the body of the stories, a token mention of France’s military involvement in Syria briefly appears. By contrast, in stories about Beirut, the military and geopolitical details take centre stage – nearly every paragraph examines Hezbollah’s deployment in Syria. There are virtually no quotes from the victims and the word “terrorism” is rarely used.

In Paris there are detailed descriptions of the music venue and sports stadium where the violence took place. In Beirut there is little or no mention of the marketplace, mosque or school that bore the brunt of the explosions.

And then there’s this article by writer Faraz Talat in The Dawn:

It is not unreasonable to feel bitter knowing that the world has accepted our pain as an inevitability; our sensation-less Wednesday merely background noise to the ‘real’ traumas of the first world.

To thrash this out further, let’s contrast the media coverage of the Mumbai attacks of 26/11 versus Paris. Similar conclusions come to light. First, did the Mumbai attacks receive as much attention in the western press as Paris?

Google’s advance search shows that between November 26 and November 30, 2008, the New York Times’ website carried about 40 stories on the Mumbai attacks. The website of The Guardian carried about 75 articles and that of The Washington Post carried about 14 articles.

On Paris attacks, between November 13 and November 17, 2015, NYT’s website carried 301 articles. The Guardian and The Washington Post carried 259 and 281 pieces respectively. These are just three newspapers and can’t represent the “Western media” but the numbers do give us some indication of the mainstream narrative. Given the digital revolution of newsrooms, it should also be noted that the reason for more stories on Paris attacks could simply be that more stories are being filed for the web today.

More importantly, how were the attacks reported on in the initial days of 26/11 as opposed to Paris? Consider this article in NYT headlined “India Faces Reckoning as Terror Toll Eclipses 170”. Besides the poor choice of the word “reckoning”, the article talks about “continuing signs that despite the country’s long vulnerability to terrorist attacks, Indian law enforcement remains ill-prepared”.

Another opinion piece in The Guardian highlighted the “need for solution in Kashmir” in the aftermath of 26/11. A day after the attack, the newspaper carried another piece with the headline “Mumbai: city of dreams and extreme poverty”, stating that the city is “no stranger to violence”. The Washington Post carried a timeline of “India’s growing terrorism”.

All of the above observations may have some merit or the other. But commentary that raises disingenuous claims of “causes” of terror within days of the Mumbai attack fails to capture the tragedy sufficiently and normalises the event. It is to say, what happened was bad, but surely nothing new for you guys.

In an incisive piece for The Hoot in 2008, Vamsee Juluri, professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, talks about the international press’ hurry to “domesticise 26/11”, to show that terror, like water problems, is something that is routine in India. Some headlines chose to frame the event as “Terror in Mumbai” as opposed to “Attack on Mumbai”.

Even before the siege was formally ended, even as speculation and scrutiny grew, a rather strong group of voices converged in the international press on to what they saw as the obvious issue here: India.

For now, we haven’t seen questions being asked about France’s preparedness after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, neither do we see pieces talking about the country failing its Muslim youth even as it emerges that all attackers were Europeans. France’s role in Syria is only a footnote in most copies.

Finally, is the media alone to be blamed? Arvind Rajagopal, professor of media studies at New York University, in a response to an email questionnaire, states that the problem of an asymmetrical war is reflected in asymmetrical media coverage.

“We can think about it via ‘media dark’ and ‘media bright’ zones – the former are places media don’t reach, whereas the latter are reached,” he says, adding that terrorist violence attempts to link the two, and draw attention to media dark areas, and also to the frightening readiness of some people to sacrifice their lives for this “cause”.

“My point here is that the media are actually the territory where war is now being fought. It would not do to kill people in a remote place. They must be near TV news crews etc. Visibility is what is at stake. So we should ask, what do they want us to see? The answer is that they want us to see that ‘we’ too can die — not only the people who are out of sight and out of mind.”

Rajagopal makes a pertinent point. Much of the grievance against the Western press post-Paris related to questioning why certain areas continue to be “media dark” zones. To dismiss that as mere “whining” is to miss the point.

Coming back to what Ilaiah said at the lit fest at 2013. It may have been unpopular at the time but can one deny the observation was correct? The media, like all institutions, has its failings. Even though its remit is to expose injustice, it can be hobbled by the same forces of class and privilege that perpetuate injustice insidiously. The least we can do is to focus attention on the matter again and again so that in world riven by violence and prejudice, the media does not choose its battles based on who the victims are.