Roy Greenslade: Why the Paris attacks gained more coverage than other atrocities

Why should a massacre in France get far greater media coverage in Britain than massacres in the Lebanon, Iraq and Kenya?

Last Thursday, 44 people died in suicide bombings in Beirut. In August, 67 people were killed by a truck bomb in Sadr City in north-eastern Iraq. In April, 147 people, most of them students, were shot dead at Garissa University in north-eastern Kenya.

All of these horrific incidents were reported by the British media. But they didn’t get much more than a newspaper headline and a couple of minutes on TV and radio bulletins.

None received the wall-to-wall coverage granted to the Paris attacks.

One obvious reason is proximity. France is close to home. It is our closest continental neighbour and we are also linked through our membership of the European Union.

Our former enemy from across the Channel long ago became an ally and although we do not share a language, we do share a political and social culture born in the age of enlightenment.

It is also undeniable, if somewhat unpalatable to many sensitive people, that mass deaths in faraway places, whether they are due to terrorism or natural disaster, rarely engender big UK media interest.

There are odd exceptions, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But its effect was unprecedented, with more than 300,000 deaths.

Some large earthquakes do grab attention, including those in Chile and Haiti in 2010 and Japan in 2011.

However, most news is local and audience interest (or lack of it) dictates decisions made by editors.

In pre-internet days, it could be argued that they made their calls based on hunches about the readers’ and viewers’ appetites.

Now, with the availability of online metrics, it is possible for them to gauge exactly the level of audience engagement with any given story.

It is true that media coverage helps to stimulate interest, but only up to a point. People will not click on to a story unless they really want to.

Nor should we overlook the truth, which some find distressing and unacceptable, that we tend to identify more closely with “people like us” — people who share our western culture.

And, I am sure, that facet of human nature holds fast elsewhere in the world. People in other cultures are more interested in what happens to those who are closest to them.

I recall that many commentators pointed to what they regarded as disproportionate coverage, in both the United States and Britain, of the 71 Americans who died during hurricane Sandy in 2012.

The 162 who died elsewhere, in seven other countries, were overlooked.

There were two other aspects to the French carnage that we shouldn’t overlook.

First, there was the indiscriminate nature of the murders in places where people congregate for leisure. On everyone’s lips surely was the thought that it could have been me.

Second, Britain has had its share of outrages perpetrated by misguided Muslims.

That would have stimulated another thought — it could happen here.

In a sense, the French victims, as distinct from those in the atrocities in the Lebanon, Iraq and Kenya, were “our” victims.

Roy Greenslade is Professor of Journalism, City University London, and writes a blog for the Guardian