Questions about Paris media coverage

T

he horrendous terrorist attacks in Paris and the resulting blanket media coverage have once again raised questions about the proportionality of news coverage when it comes to reporting deadly events.

The Facebook Paris filter.

The argument goes that the Paris attacks are unfairly given more coverage than similar events in other places around the world – such as last Thursday’s bombings in Beirut, which killed 44 people, or the shooting of 147 people at a university in Kenya in April, to name just two examples.

And as large numbers of Facebook users apply a French flag filter to their profile pictures, others are questioning why it did not offer Syrian flags to show solidarity with the victims of terrorist attacks in that country.

Read today’s piece on The Conversation by the Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow, Queensland University of Technology, Folker Hanusch, “Disproportionate coverage of Paris attacks is not just the media’s fault.”

(Climate change is already, and will be, a far more serious event than what happened in Paris, but immediacy of violent deaths with a clearly identifiable adversary, fires an emotional response that the world’s media feels it must respond to. And of course, it does for it is shoulder deep in the populism that appears to control the behaviour of corporate-owned media that defines it behaviour by profit. Beyond that, it sees the attacks in Paris as a direct assault of the lifestyles emanating from business-as-usual status quo and, of course, those same profits.)