How should media treat tragedies?

On Monday, a number of cowardly, horrific attacks on innocent people occurred, both in Boston and Iraq.

I was thinking about this quite a bit last night. The BBC website reported that 31 people were killed in bomb attacks and explosions across Iraq, although the Wall Street Journal put this figure at 61.

Targeting civilians is always wrong, whether they’re runners and spectators, including eight-year-old children, at a marathon, or innocent Iraqis stuck in traffic during the Monday morning commute.

I read some criticism of how, when a tragedy in a rich, Western country occurs, people are quick to log onto their social media accounts to type messages of grief and sympathy, while seemingly ignoring the suffering of innocents that happens on a daily basis in the poorer, war-ravaged parts of the world.

I totally disagree with the view that the public outpouring of grief every time an attack happens in America is nauseating. I think this is a sign that people have compassion and sympathy for the innocent victims of these horrors. I fail to see how that is nauseating.

Some people criticise Western media outlets for giving more priority to tragedies in richer countries than they do to poorer ones. This was evident on Brazilian news channels too, just as it was evident last year when Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern US seaboard — the coverage the USA got in the media dwarfed that of the smaller, poorer, Caribbean nations.

Is this prioritising of Western tragedies by the Western media a moral failure on their part? Or is it a case that Western media organisations have more contacts and resources near the scenes of where Western tragedies occur? Or do they feel their viewers will have more sympathy for victims they feel viewers can relate to? What influences these editorial decisions?

Is it a moral failure on Westerners, who hear about terrible events, who then send social media messages of sympathy (and make similar sympathetic comments during coffee break chats) to victims of tragedies in rich countries, while they might not do the same for the equally innocent victims in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Have people just come to expect to hear about senseless blood-letting in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and are therefore immune, de-sensitised to it? Stalin’s comment about the death of one man being a tragedy, but the death of a million, a statistic, chillingly resonates now.

Do we — that is, the media and the public — really give equal worth to all human suffering?

James Gaffney

Minas Gerais

Brazil