The charge that Western mass media failed to report on the bombs in Beirut does not withstand a simple web-search. According to Google, 5,190 articles appeared on the subject on November 12th (the day before the Paris attacks). As of November 18th, 15,000 are available, with more than 400—including one in the New York Times—dedicated to comparing the treatment of the tragedies in the two cities. However, it is true that the attacks in Paris generated coverage on a different magnitude, yielding 2.5m stories on November 14th (although these figures probably overstate the disparity, since they count each appearance of wire-service reports that can be published hundreds of times). And after an initial surge in search traffic for “Beirut” following the bombings, the internet’s interest quickly waned, only to recover following the news from Paris. Even then, searches for “Beirut” did not reach even 1% of the maximum volume for “Paris”
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Measuring the global empathy gap
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/terrorism-and-empathy
The charge that Western mass media failed to report on the bombs in Beirut does not withstand a simple web-search. According to Google, 5,190 articles appeared on the subject on November 12th (the day before the Paris attacks). As of November 18th, 15,000 are available, with more than 400—including one in the New York Times—dedicated to comparing the treatment of the tragedies in the two cities. However, it is true that the attacks in Paris generated coverage on a different magnitude, yielding 2.5m stories on November 14th (although these figures probably overstate the disparity, since they count each appearance of wire-service reports that can be published hundreds of times). And after an initial surge in search traffic for “Beirut” following the bombings, the internet’s interest quickly waned, only to recover following the news from Paris. Even then, searches for “Beirut” did not reach even 1% of the maximum volume for “Paris”
The charge that Western mass media failed to report on the bombs in Beirut does not withstand a simple web-search. According to Google, 5,190 articles appeared on the subject on November 12th (the day before the Paris attacks). As of November 18th, 15,000 are available, with more than 400—including one in the New York Times—dedicated to comparing the treatment of the tragedies in the two cities. However, it is true that the attacks in Paris generated coverage on a different magnitude, yielding 2.5m stories on November 14th (although these figures probably overstate the disparity, since they count each appearance of wire-service reports that can be published hundreds of times). And after an initial surge in search traffic for “Beirut” following the bombings, the internet’s interest quickly waned, only to recover following the news from Paris. Even then, searches for “Beirut” did not reach even 1% of the maximum volume for “Paris”
