Narrative

There are three things that have happened recently:

• A bomb was planted outside the office of the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP.
• Two men shot up a magazine office in France, killing 12 and wounding eleven others.
• Boko Haram massacred people in Nigeria. The death toll may be as many as 2000, but counting has been difficult.

The first question would be which has gotten the most news coverage, but that's too easy. The first significant coverage of the NAACP bombing was how people were upset that it wasn't covered, starting about two days after it occurred. The Boko Haram story has been seen on a news crawl across the bottom of the screen, but Charlie Hebdo is getting major coverage of the incident itself, the response by other cartoonists, the social media response, think pieces about the social media response, the protest march, and stories about how the leaders at the protest march staged a fake photo opportunity.

That makes the question "why"; how do the news channels choose what to cover?

There is a saying, "If it bleeds, it leads." Based on that, the NAACP bombing isn't that big a story. Fortunately the gasoline can did not detonate, so there were no fatalities. However, still based on that, the priority story should have been Nigeria. There are a lot more dead, and the threat of much more destruction, because the Charlie Hebdo shooters are dead now but Boko Haram is still active.

Of course, Nigeria is very far away from the United States, and Boko Haram is not a direct threat, perhaps, but based on an elevation of domestic interests, then the NAACP should have been the lead story. That is terrorism on our native soil, because when an anonymous bomber targets an organization working for social good, what else could you possibly call it? Yes, the Charlie Hebdo shooting was an assault to freedom of the press, but the NAACP bombing is a general attack on civil rights. That sounds important, right? But that's not how it played out.

It is possible that the story of brown people shooting white people was considered more urgent and important than a white person trying to blow up black people or black people massacring other black people. I don't want to think that's how it goes, but it's possible.

I mean, you can't give equal coverage to every story, but you will still cover a lot of stories and combined together they will create some kind of narrative about the world. So let us consider that in light of this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/randolph-linn-fox-news-mosque-arson_n_2345708.html

An Indiana man got riled up by Fox News before setting fire to a mosque.

I don't doubt that the beer played a role, but reading his responses to the judge, he knows no Muslims, or anything about Islam, only what he hears on Fox News and on the radio.

"Every day you turn on the TV, you see Muslims trying to kill Americans."

But you could see Muslims killing other Muslims, which might lead you to believe it wasn't merely a matter of race and religion, or you might see racists trying to set back civil rights, both by crude methods like bombing and more sophisticated methods like rolling back sections of the Voting Rights Act. There are a lot of different potential stories out there, but this is the one he received.

Which is of course one reason why it is important to have more than one source of news, but it might also be something for each individual source of news to think about.