Configuring terrorism in the age of ISIS: The New York Times ’ coverage of the 2015 Beirut and Paris attacks

Abstract

This study inquires whether cultural proximity may explain how media handle terrorism in a global village era where cultural proximity may have given way to cosmopolitanism in news-making. Findings indicate that although loss of life is not culture-bound, cultural proximity persists, as comes through in the sheer contrast in the amount of coverage devoted to Paris versus Beirut. This distinction ought to be qualified, for even with Paris, the self-interest of the nation-state was prioritized, meaning that national security and welfare come first, followed by those of culturally proximate locales. Sensational violence was emphasized for both Lebanese and French victims.

Keywords

Beirut cosmopolitanism cultural proximity global village ISIS Paris terrorism

Of all the names the world has come to associate with terrorism, perhaps none has gained more notoriety in the last few years than ISIS. Short for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (and alternatively known as ISIL, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), ISIS has been linked to violence whose total casualties number in the thousands (Jamieson, 2016).

The 12 November 2015 suicide bombings in Beirut that killed over 40 people – the worst terrorist attack in the city since the Lebanese Civil War’s end in 1990 (BBC News, 2015) – were followed the next day in Paris with ‘a shooting rampage, explosions and mass hostage-taking that President François Hollande called an unprecedented terrorist attack on France’ (Nossiter and Gladstone, 2015: 1) and that killed 130 people. ISIS, the self-proclaimed culprit of both events, all but reified its image as a mighty force that leaders and masses alike should reckon with.

As international terrorism increasingly threatens even powerful nation-states in a globalized era (Han et al., 2010), media coverage becomes pivotal in not only delivering news but also helping untangle the complex nuances involved. At the helm of combating ISIS is the United States, and The New York Times’ discourse on the Beirut and Paris attacks is this article’s concern. Specifically, this comparative study inquires whether cultural proximity (with France’s greater than Lebanon’s) may help explain how media handle terrorism – a phenomenon unbound by culture – within a global village era where cultural proximity may have given way to cosmopolitanism in news-making. This study posits cosmopolitanism as a potential alternative news value to cultural proximity.

Literature review

Terrorism through the media lens

Drawing upon sociologist Erving Goffman’s ideas on framing, Antecol (1997) points out that people use situational frames to understand a particular event at a particular place. The frames people choose to understand a situation will influence how they respond and what they consider appropriate:

Situational behavior and information-flow are determined as much by those who are included as those excluded because the boundaries and barriers that are inherent in physical and place-based locations tend to include certain people at the expense of others. (p. 456)

When uncertainty exists about the framing of a situation, experts are sought to aid interpretation. Every society supports specific frames and individuals are introduced to them during the socialization process, which is both informal and vicarious. Technology enables exposure to new frames and situations. Antecol argues that while, theoretically, ‘the common experience of one nation’ could ‘become the common experience of another nation’, this has not happened yet, although the possibility of a true global village remains (p. 460).

Since international terrorism is a staple of the post-World War II system (Beck and Miner, 2013), it is no wonder that media content is inundated with news of political violence. Persistent scholarly interest in media war coverage (e.g. Althaus et al., 2014) attests to the continued prominence of conflict as a news value.

There is evidence that shock value overwhelmingly underpins news coverage of terrorism. A study of British TV news channels’ treatment of the 2008 Mumbai attacks found that the fear, awe and terror theme was predominant, with particular focus on ‘the descriptive narrative of events; witnesses’ accounts; moving images; still pictures and their accompanying sounds, etc’ (Iqbal, 2015: 202). This, the author assumes, is indicative of media’s pursuit of maximal audience ratings. Meanwhile, ‘skewed coverage’ characterized other themes such as responsibility for the attacks as well as victims’ defiance, mourning and suffering (Iqbal, 2015: 211).

With the post-9/11 US-declared global ‘War on Terror’ – primarily waged in Afghanistan and Iraq and joined by mainly Western countries – much ensuing terrorism news coverage took place within this war’s context. Yet, even though terrorism was a dominant frame in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal’s war coverage (Glazier and Boydstun, 2012), journalists from USA Today, the highest-circulating national newspaper and which ‘seeks to speak with a national voice’ (Lewis and Reese, 2009: 89), expressed frustration with the difficulty of defining the War on Terror and disappointment with its usage in the press, and most seemed resigned to accept that the phrase had become a convenient (yet unfortunate) shorthand for Bush administration policies since 9/11 (Lewis and Reese, 2009: 90).

Despite the ambiguous nature of terrorism-related semantics, the press aligns with the president’s frames during periods of national unity following a crisis (Glazier and Boydstun, 2012). Noteworthy is that France (a centrepiece in this study) did not join the US-led invasion of Iraq, implemented as part of the US War on Terror.

In a related vein, analysis of formal terrorism designations by the United States, Britain and European Union indicates that listed organizations not only have a track record of violence against a government’s citizens, but also tend to target aviation and have an Islamic ideological basis (Beck and Miner, 2013).

Paralleling these findings are those of a study that analysed coverage of 11 terrorist events on the US soil since 9/11 in mainstream US newspapers and TV networks. Each event’s coverage began with labelling or questioning if the suspect was Muslim before ascertaining identity. For Muslim suspects, this identity was repeated in every story, ‘solidifying the connection between terrorism and Islam’ (Powell, 2011: 97). And unlike international terrorism, whose motives were construed as avenging the killing of Muslims, Islamic radicalism and killing, domestic terrorism motives were individualized and ‘not part of a larger terrorist plot against the United States’ (Powell, 2011: 100).

In examining framing of Islam per se in 18 large-circulation US newspapers, Bowe et al. (2015) found covering Islam was far more negative than positive, but also more neutral than negative, arguing this may reflect ‘the impact of certain American journalistic conventions like objectivity’ where ‘balance plays out through competing frames rather than within one frame’ (p. 51).

A cross-national study of four broadcasting outlets’ (CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC and the German ARD) coverage of four major terrorist attacks (in London, Madrid, Amman and Sharm El Sheikh) indicated media consensus on the attacks’ illegitimacy (Gerhards and Schäfer, 2014). The study’s authors argue this can be understood ‘as part of a world culture which is codified by the decisions of the United Nations’, where ‘the mass media’s evaluation of a topic can be expected to be largely uniform because there are no high-status actors from outside the media who publicly approve of the terrorist acts’ (p. 18). Nevertheless, the study highlighted differences in coverage, most notably that CNN and Al Jazeera interpreted the attacks as an expression of the ‘global war on terror’, whereas the BBC and ARD saw them as ‘crimes against humanity’ by a few individuals. Also, Al Jazeera and CNN engaged in greater personalization of the attacks’ victims and provided richer detail on perpetrators than do BBC and ARD. Furthermore, Al Jazeera stood out from the other three channels as ‘the only one that describes occasions where Muslims were victims of discrimination in the West’ (p. 15). The authors attribute this and similar distinctions between Al Jazeera and CNN, which shared an overall interpretive framework as mentioned earlier, to ‘their different evaluations of the geopolitical situation’ (p. 14). After all, CNN is a US-based news medium, while the Qatar-based Al Jazeera stems from a Middle Eastern, mostly Muslim context.

The impact of terrorism news coverage on audiences can also be complicated and multidimensional. In a study of viewer responses among Israeli high school students to a televised interview of a Palestinian female terrorist, Rosenberg and Maoz (2012) found that the participants expressed conflicting emotions ranging from anger and hatred to compassion and pity towards her.

Although the participants were known to have hawkish political views, the personalized media interview of the female terrorist – who was a young mother, physically attractive, fragile, gentle and yet the face of the dreaded ‘enemy’ – created dissonance among the viewers. While the study highlighted the role played by gender in the construction of images of the ‘enemy’, it also showed how a more personalized genre of journalism can create dissonant responses among viewers. Even as the participants in the study sympathized with the terrorist’s ‘femininity’, they castigated her for not meeting the norms of motherhood and discredited her identity and message.

They also blamed the media for interviewing her and being ‘too mild’ with her:

It seems thus that when the Jewish-Israeli interviewer, obeying generic journalistic norms, refrains from expressing the aggression, resentment or hostility of the group to which he belongs, the viewers who share this group identity feel as they have lost their representative and spokesperson in the drama, having lost their voice. (Rosenberg and Maoz, 2012: 62)

News, culture and global village

Cultural proximity – a crux of this study – was a statistically significant predictor of international news coverage in three of four examined newspapers in Horvit et al.’s (2013) study, with Iraq accounting for significantly more coverage than any other country. Even Afghanistan and Pakistan prominently figured in the news being also ‘clearly related to U.S. national security interests because U.S. forces were engaged in combat in Afghanistan and faced spillover effects in neighboring Pakistan’ (p. 98). Outside the news-making realm but still within the mediascape (see Appadurai, 1990), Taneja and Wu (2014) found that cultural proximity (e.g. shared language and geographical focus) plays a greater role than access blockage (widely known as the Great Firewall of China) in shaping online user behaviour in China.

Global interactivity is also manifest in media–terrorism scholarship. A study of Indian news media’s coverage of the Mumbai attacks, or ‘India’s 9/11’ (Ray, 2009, in Creech, 2014: 406), indicates that sometimes the term Mumbai ‘represents a brand of global capitalism threatened by the attacks’ (p. 409). Further, such references as ‘India’s 9/11’ and ‘26/11’ (the attacks’ date) ‘impart an idiom that explicitly defers to a global war on terror’ (p. 409).

And while new media technologies have made global culture seemingly more participatory, this participatory culture is arguably not characterized by an entire body of citizens gaining access to democratic institutions with the help of the media; instead, such participation is marked by ‘re-tribalization’ or the emergence of subcultural networks (Valcanis, 2011: 40).

The interactive and user-oriented nature of the new media technologies have led to the emergence of ‘a “mash-up” culture in which ways of producing and accessing content are deconstructed, uploaded, mixed, converged, and reconstructed though computers and smartphones mediated by online platforms’ (Valcanis, 2011: 39).

New media technologies have not merely produced new communication platforms but have further ‘shaped a new way of organizing and regulating ideas: the way humans interact with one another and conduct their business, their politics and their education of future generations’ (Valcanis, 2011: 42).

Indeed, sometimes such technologies can serve as substitutes for more traditional media outlets. The New York Times, whose subscriptions account for more than half its revenue,

has been shifting from direct-response approaches to softer sells like buying traffic on social media and content-recommendation engines. Now, it’s finding success in targeting audiences on Facebook and getting them not just to visit the site but to subscribe, too. (Moses, 2015)

‘“We know not everyone on Facebook is a casual reader,” said Mat Yurow, the Times’ director of audience development. “There’s still potential to find loyal subscribers”’ (Moses, 2015).

In 2016, The New York Times reported that it will invest more than US$50 million over the next 3 years to expand its international digital audience and increase revenue outside the United States, even forming a new team (NYT Global) to lead the effort (Ember, 2016).

This article attempts to investigate The New York Times’ news and opinion coverage of the Paris and Beirut attacks against a backdrop that takes into account the combined dynamic of media–terrorism and variation in cultural proximity of Paris and Beirut vis-à-vis the United States, all within a so-called global village where events in one setting often have resounding effects elsewhere.

Drawing on the foregoing concepts, the article poses the following research questions:

RQ1. How did The New York Times cover the 2015 Paris and Beirut terrorist attacks in both its news and opinion sections?

RQ2. How can coverage patterns be understood in context of the cultural proximity–global village–terrorism dynamic?

Method

To retrieve relevant news material for the 12 November Beirut attacks, a Lexis-Nexis search was conducted within The New York Times record using the term ‘Beirut’ for the 13–27 November 2015 period. For the 14 November Paris attacks, a search using the term ‘Paris’ was conducted for the 14–21 November 2015 period. A longer time frame was selected for Beirut (2 weeks vs 1 week) due to the limited number of articles that resulted from only a 1-week search, thus leading us to double the time period so as to collect sufficient material for analysis. The ‘Paris’ search yielded an aggregate total of 323 articles, while the ‘Beirut’ search yielded an aggregate total of 39 articles. In order to achieve two relatively balanced subsets of data quantity-wise (one for each city), we selected every sixth article from the group of 323 Paris results to incorporate into our studied sample. We, therefore, analysed 53 articles from the Paris subset (nine of which were opinion items) as well as the entire group of 39 articles (13 of which were opinion items) from the Beirut subset. Hence, a total of 92 articles constituted our sample. So, while acknowledging the difference in coverage devoted to each of the two cities’ attacks, the variation in time frame was purposely done to accumulate enough substance to analyse in order to appropriately fulfil our research objectives.

Both news and opinion (editorials, opinion columns and letters to the editor) items were included because, in addition to the ideally objective reporting on the events, opinion discourse often embodies perspectives absent from straight news content (e.g. Ismail et al., 2009), which becomes especially relevant given the inherently controversial nature of terrorism.

As the United States’ long-undisputed newspaper of record, The New York Times was chosen for its significance as a reference point in popular and policy circles alike, both domestically and globally. In many respects, it is regarded as a representative of US journalism.

Thematic textual analysis was employed to examine the data, as have various previous studies that tackled terrorism coverage (e.g. Iqbal, 2015), where themes are identified to help interpret the particularities that characterize news text: ‘A theme is a construct which represents a certain pattern occurring in a recurring and/or regular fashion in the given data’ (Iqbal, 2015: 201).

Analysis

The first research question asked how The New York Times covered the 2015 Paris and Beirut terrorist attacks in both its news and editorial sections.

Paris

Classic terrorism coverage: Communicating violence and culpability

As past literature would forecast, The New York Times highlighted the graphic nature of the violence in a way that communicates the shock value and grave consequences of a terrorist event of this magnitude. One article’s lead stated the day following the events: ‘The Paris area reeled Friday night from a shooting rampage, explosions and mass hostage-taking that President François Hollande called an unprecedented terrorist attack on France’. The article later relayed how witnesses on French television ‘said the scene at the concert hall, which can seat as many as 1500 people, was a massacre, describing how gunmen with automatic weapons shot bursts of bullets into the crowd’ (Nossiter and Gladstone, 2015).

A different article described how ‘militants with AK-47 rifles and suicide explosives vests shattered the peaceful revelry of Paris on Friday night, killing dozens of civilians in restaurants and at a concert hall’ (Rubin and Barnard, 2015).

‘Carnage’ vividly emerged as an oft-used post-attacks descriptor. In one instance, we read that Hollande ‘vowed to be “unforgiving with the barbarians” of the Islamic State after the carnage in Paris’ (Rubin and Barnard, 2015), while a collection of letters to the editor on the subject was titled ‘After the Carnage in Paris’ (The New York Times, 2015). An article on the concert scene that witnessed a portion of the attacks recounted: ‘There were shouts of “Allahu akbar” just before the gunmen opened fire, and for about 20 minutes there was carnage’ (Nossiter and Higgins, 2015), while another alluded to the attacks ‘that wrought carnage in Paris’ (Hughes, 2015).

ISIS emerged as a primary actor in the news, having claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks. An illustrative moment is this news report’s lead: ‘France bombed the Syrian city of Raqqa on Sunday night, its most aggressive strike against the Islamic State group it blames for killing 129 people in a string of terrorist attacks across Paris only two days before’ (Rubin and Barnard, 2015). Illuminating the rationale for Western forces’ shared interest in battling ISIS, a separate news article references the range of the group’s recent operations as a ‘diabolical range of recent attacks claimed by the Islamic State – a Russian airliner blown up in Egypt, a double suicide bombing in Beirut and Friday’s ghastly assaults on Paris’ (Shane, 2015).

Maintaining perspective on ISIS-inflicted victimization, The New York Times pointed out, ‘Muslims account for a majority of the Islamic State’s victims in Iraq and Syria, and some of those killed in Paris last week’ (Barnard and MacFarquhar, 2015). The primary motive for ISIS’ behaviour is identified as the same in both news and opinion discourse. One op-ed explains that, according to ‘certain Islamist newspapers’, the Paris attacks ‘were the result of the onslaught against Islam’, where ‘The Palestinian question is invoked along with the rape of Iraq and the memory of colonial trauma’ (Daoud, 2015). Echoing this terrorism-as-retaliation motive is a news report’s account of a witness at the concert hall, one of the attacks’ sites, who said a gunman shouted: ‘What you are doing in Syria, you are going to pay for it now’ (Nossiter and Gladstone, 2015).

Nevertheless, the anomalous nature of the perpetrators in the context of the larger Muslim community was delineated: ‘Muslims around the world who have condemned the deadly attacks in Paris … are speaking out to defend their religion’, further elaborating: ‘The attacks … were not the work of Muslims, many say, adding that they see it as their responsibility to protect Islam from being hijacked by extremists’ (Bromwich, 2015).

Noteworthy is that although hardly any time separated the Beirut and Paris attacks, the earlier noted passing mention of Beirut is representative of the latter’s meagre presence in our Paris-geared news sample. In fact, the only other time the Lebanese capital shows up in this collection of articles is as it intersects with the Paris events: ‘The attacks in Beirut, Lebanon, on Thursday and in Paris on Friday, however, are likely to add greater urgency to the call to tackle the Islamic State’ (The New York Times, 2015).

Situating Paris on the global terrorism map

News articles in The New York Times handled the Paris attacks predominantly in terms of implications for the global war on terrorism (even including relevant security measures and policymaking), with particular emphasis on US involvement. Indeed, the attacks were conveyed as a turning point in how violence perpetrators and supporters on the one hand perceive their mission, and world leaders’ perceptions of how best to battle terrorism on the other. Quoting a professor at King’s College London and director of its International Centre for the Study of Radicalization, The New York Times wrote, ‘“and now, with the attack in Paris, people are super enthusiastic again,” [Peter] Neumann said of Islamic State chatter on social media. “Like they are on a winning team”’ (Barnard and MacFarquhar, 2015):

Paris-as-turning-point also comes to the fore in the context of mass public events:

If the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 showed with devastating effect how a sporting event could be a target for terrorists, then the Paris attacks have forced teams and leagues to further examine security protocols for more-contained sporting events that bring tens of thousands of people together in a stadium or arena. (Borden, 2015)

In parallel, coverage tackled how commander-in-chief stakeholders are strategizing to counter ISIS. One article explained that Russia’s announcement that it was ‘coordinating with the French military in sharply ratcheting up attacks on Syrian territory, especially areas held by the Islamic State’ came ‘after France had already begun striking Islamic State targets and had called for a united front against the group’ (MacFarquhar, 2015). The same article underlined relevant policy in the US arena: ‘In a related move, President Obama said early Wednesday that he was open to cooperating with Russia in the campaign against the Islamic State’.

US Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch was quoted underscoring the US–French allied interests in this realm: ‘We stand in solidarity with France, as it has stood with us so often in the past’ (Nossiter and Gladstone, 2015).

On the home front, and in a blanket government statement on the Paris attacks’ domestic impact, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security asserted, ‘We will not hesitate to adjust our security posture, as appropriate, to protect the American people’ (Nossiter and Gladstone, 2015).

And though we do not see military intervention targeting ISIS directly designated as part of the ‘war on terror’, the rhetoric employed implies as much, as epitomized in Hollande’s reference to the Paris killings as ‘an “act of war,”’ with which White House officials said US President Barack Obama ‘agreed’ and ‘they promised that the United States would deepen cooperation with French officials’ (Shear and Baker, 2015).

The citizen/state dilemma: Privacy, national security and humanitarianism

Ripple effects of Paris on citizen privacy policies also occupied their share of media attention. A news report explained that Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain suggested ‘he might put aggressive surveillance proposals … while President François Hollande of France called for a package of tough measures, stepping up surveillance and permitting raids without warrants’, noting that in the United States, ‘surveillance is the core issue for the security agencies combating the Islamic State … and for the watchdog groups that monitor those agencies’ (Shane, 2015).

The same article’s mentioning ‘the particular concern among Muslims that they are being unfairly targeted’ (Shane, 2015) constitutes a point of contention within the newspaper’s discourse on the controversial practice of surveillance, in both its news and editorial venues. A news report’s account of name-calling, between Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City and Republican presidential candidate Donald J Trump identifies de Blasio’s disapproval of Trump’s expressed support for police surveillance of mosques (Grynbaum, 2015). A letter to the editor opined,

I have long been a strong supporter of civil liberties, including free speech. But I’m willing to give up some small measure of my liberty and privacy to allow what needs to be done to prevent a Paris-like attack in this country. (Morrison, 2015)

The New York Times gave special prominence to the Syrian refugee crisis along with the US position vis-à-vis incoming refugees to the United States. The root cause of hyped attention to the Syrian refugee crisis in the aftermath of Paris, we learn, is ‘the revelation that the French police had found a Syrian passport at one attack site that was used by a man who had passed from Turkey to Greece in October’ (Smale, 2015).

The New York Times’ opinion section embodied a clear editorial stance on the issue of Syrian refugees’ seeking haven in the United States, favouring that the country continue to welcome them. A typical op-ed argued,

Civilization does not close its door to an orphaned toddler looking to start a new life in the United States, as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has proposed. Civilization does not apply a religious test to victims of religious fanaticism, as Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, wants to do. Only those who pray to Jesus, in his plan, would be allowed to resettle the United States. (Egan, 2015)

In fact, The New York Times’ editorial board made its stance explicit in an editorial carrying its by-line, where it discussed a bill Congress was scheduled to vote on – one that ‘seeks to “pause” admission of Syrian and Iraqi refugees’ in condemnatory terms: ‘Though there are real fears of terrorism, this measure represents election-year pandering to the xenophobia that rears up when threats from abroad arise’ (The Editorial Board, 2015b).

Beirut

Coverage of the Beirut attacks in The New York Times barely delved into the fears and anxieties faced by the residents of the city and their experiences in the aftermath of the attacks. Since the scant coverage on the Beirut attacks rarely offered details about the people affected directly or indirectly by suicide bombings, it was nearly impossible to conjure up an image of their everyday lives and livelihoods. In fact, several articles that contained the word ‘Beirut’ in their text merely mentioned the attacks in the city in passing and primarily focused on the Paris attacks and the shock and sadness felt by the world regarding the latter.

Tellingly, most of the articles focused on a shift in ISIS strategy as signalled by the most recent attacks, Western response to those attacks, and the influx of refugees faced by Western countries. The coverage was framed primarily in terms of discussion and debate at the level of strategy and policy and barely made the reader experience the views and concerns of the average Beirut resident.

Little coverage on distant and different Beirut

An article published on the day of the Beirut attacks reported how the ‘fiery double suicide bombing terrorized a mostly Shiite residential area of southern Beirut’ (Barnard and Saad, 2015). It pointed out that the blast shattered the ‘relative calm’ prevailing in Beirut over the ‘recent months’.

A report by the public editor of The New York Times mentioned that since some readers had ‘objected to the relative paucity of coverage’ on the Beirut attacks, The New York Times correspondent Anne Barnard had responded to the objections with ‘a well-reported piece on this very subject’ (Sullivan, 2015). The article, which carried the headline, ‘Beirut, also the site of deadly attacks, feels forgotten’, included the voices of several residents of the city and their feelings about the ‘global outpouring of sympathy’ for Paris while little came their way (Barnard, 2015b). A Lebanese doctor commented, ‘When my people died, they did not send the world into mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something happens in those parts of the world’ (Barnard, 2015b). Several residents interviewed by the reporter in this article blamed the media ‘for the perception that Beirut is still an active war zone’.

An article on Americans’ response to the Paris attacks explained that they were more affected by them than violence unleashed by ISIS in other parts of the world for specific reasons: ‘The Islamic State’s rampage in Paris felt scarier, somewhat closer to home than the years long slaughter of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis, the recent suicide bombings in Beirut or the bombing of a Russian passenger jet’ (Healy and Fausset, 2015). Meanwhile, a part-time nurse, who was quoted in the article, pointed out, ‘I feel France is more similar to us … It was, like, I could have been there. My son could have been there. I could [be] the one sitting outside on a café and getting sprayed by bullets’ (Healy and Fausset, 2015).

Attacks signal shift in ISIS strategy

Several articles highlighted that the attacks in Paris and Beirut and the downing of the Russian airliner in Egypt reflected a shift in ISIS strategy. For instance, an article highlighted that the Islamic State was now engaging in ‘a centrally planned campaign of terrorist attacks’ with the goal of causing heavy casualties in distant countries, which would lead to the United States and Europe reassessing the situation and their response (Schmitt and Kirkpatrick, 2015).

Another report reasoned that a possible motivation for the change in strategy is its attempt ‘to seize leadership of the global jihad from Al Qaeda’ (Schmitt, 2015). The article provided a history of ISIS, its break from Al Qaeda in 2013, its leadership structure and the varied strategies followed by its members and supporters. Another article traced the rise of ISIS to the combined use of ‘control of territory’ and ‘unspeakable cruelty’ (Fisher, 2015).

Still another article on tactics used by ISIS described the following:

It [ISIS] built on tactics Al Qaeda had pioneered – like the on-camera beheadings of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and, later, of other victims in Iraq. But it filmed them with Hollywood production values – for instance, clearly using sophisticated moviemaking equipment to record dozens of Egyptian Copts being slaughtered at sunset on a beach. Those techniques have proved so effective in recruiting from a generation glued to cellphone videos … (Barnard and MacFarquhar, 2015)

Meanwhile, an op-ed piece highlighted a strategic limitation of ISIS: ‘Much like Al Qaeda, ISIS has no support among the Muslim people living in Europe. It recruits only at the margins’ (Roy, 2015).

Response to ISIS attacks

Articles reported on the airstrikes conducted on Syria by France and Russia in response to the Paris attacks and the downing of the Russian airliner, respectively. A report mentioned that no civilians had been killed in the French attacks and that the airstrikes had apparently failed to cause ‘serious military damage’ (Barnard, 2015a). Another report on the French airstrikes quoted activists in Raqqa pleading with France to exercise caution and spare civilians in the city since not all residents were ISIS supporters (Rubin and Barnard, 2015).

Editorials argued that there was now need for more coordinated efforts between the United States and Russia in order to contain the ISIS (The Editorial Board, 2015a). A report discussed the differences in standpoints between the United States and Russia in terms of identifying targets: while Russia clubbed ISIS along with other insurgent groups, the United States considered some of these groups legitimate and wanted to focus primarily on ISIS (Barnard, 2015a).

Several reports indicated that the change in ISIS strategy would most likely lead to a more aggressive US strategy. A report also drew attention to the risks associated with an aggressive response strategy by Western powers: ‘The Russian airliner was attacked after Moscow intervened in Syria. And the Islamic state has warned it would step up strikes against those countries that have joined the American-led coalition fighting the group in Iraq and Syria’ (Baker and Schmitt, 2015).

There was some criticism directed at Obama for claiming just a day before the Paris attacks that ISIS had been contained (Russonello, 2015). A few editorials debated various ways in which Western powers could beat ISIS. An op-ed piece by Oliver Roy, a professor at the European Institute in Florence, emphasized that it would be difficult to defeat ISIS without the ground troops that no country has so far pledged.

Escalating refugee crisis

Editorials warned of a rise in anti-refugee sentiment due to the rising ISIS attacks. Apart from editorials, news reports on the Paris and Beirut attacks also highlighted that such violence may contribute to Europe and other Western countries closing their doors to Syrian refugees (Barnard, 2015b). An article that cited a CBS News poll on American opinion on refugees pointed out that Americans were ‘sharply split on the question of accepting refugees from Syria, with the divide falling along party lines’ (Russonello, 2015).

Readers also expressed their views on the Syrian refugees in the form of letters to the editor. For instance, one such letter to the editor argued that Syrian refugees should be permitted to enter the United States and should be used to gather intelligence about the ISIS. ‘They [Syrian refugees] speak the language, know the culture and could possibly supply other important information regarding the motivations and movement of our ISIS enemies’ (Schenkenberg, 2015). The letter carried the headline, ‘Grappling with ISIS and the Refugees’.

Overall, the focus of coverage in The New York Times on the subject of refugees dealt with the views of Western powers and how they could deal with the influx. There was, however, little on refugees living in non-Western countries. One article that focused on the refugee crisis in Lebanon admitted that the country has the most refugees in the world in terms of a percentage of its population:

In recent months, Lebanon has cracked down on border and residency controls, leaving many refugees in legal limbo and in fear of jail or harassment. Many face long-term poverty, as United Nations benefits shrink or disappear, competition for jobs mounts and children, aid agencies estimate 80 percent, are unable to attend school. All those factors are pushing more to contemplate the dangerous sea journey to Europe. (Barnard, 2015c)

The reporter explained how the refugee crisis is ‘deceptively invisible’ in Lebanon since most refugees do not live in camps, but mingle and disappear into the alleyways of the city. Except this piece, most articles highlighted the conundrum the United States and Europe were facing with regard to the large number of refugees trying to escape ISIS and the Syrian civil war.

Paris and Beirut

Competing forces? Cultural proximity and terrorism in a global village

The second research question asked how coverage patterns can be understood in the context of the cultural proximity–global village–terrorism dynamic.

We could argue, on face value and as per relevant literature, that The New York Times’ greater attention to the attacks in Paris – compared to those in Beirut – could partly be explained by a greater cultural proximity bond between the United States and France as compared to the United States and Lebanon. On closer examination, however, we glean that the Paris coverage was largely approached from the vantage point of US security and ramifications for the global war on terrorism. This seems to indicate that when a nation-state is itself a combatant in the terrorism arena, its interests (which expectedly reflect onto the media terrain) are prioritized in terms of the lens through which terrorism is constructed, even when it’s not a direct victim of the given terrorist event.

While serving as a safe haven for refugees predates modern global village rhetoric, the practice is certainly harmonious with a global village environment where human communication is ever more facilitated, ideally yielding closer human ties. In this study, though reporting presented both sides of the debate on this aspect of immigration policy – as should objective newswriting – the editorial end was a vocal proponent of inclusiveness.

The dynamic among terrorism, cultural proximity and the global village is certainly a complex one, as it is multifaceted with a variety of dimensions and actors. The nature of The New York Times’ coverage of the Beirut attacks made it a part of the global terrorism map primarily in terms of strategy – not in terms of the suffering of the people who live there. While detailed reporting and analysis of ISIS strategy and the need for the US and other Western powers to more aggressively contain terrorism was emphasized, the lives and experiences of the people embroiled in the deadly warfare in Middle Eastern countries took backstage. In an article titled ‘The empathy gap between Paris and Beirut’, Graham (2015) draws attention to the ‘tribal’ and ‘racial’ aspect of cultural proximity: ‘People tend to perk up when they see themselves as victims’. Those who are perceived as ‘distant and different’ do not garner sympathy as readily as those perceived as similar (Baig, 2016).

Detailed and personalized coverage of culturally proximate events and places has critical consequences: ‘When a news outlet decides whose life is worthy of coverage and which deaths are instead part of a larger statistic, it shapes the public’s perspective of a given crisis and even, at times, sways government policy’ (Urist, 2014). The lack of media and social outrage at terrorist attacks in Muslim-dominated regions of the world such as Beirut further ‘encourages the belief that Muslims are solely purveyors of terrorism and not deserving of sympathy’, even though so many Muslims have lost their lives in such attacks (Baig, 2016).

The media’s neat categorization of people and places hides the cracks. Graham (2015) elaborates that although many associate Paris with high culture and Beirut with war, there are several similarities between the two cities: while parts of Beirut are known for fine dining and glamorous shopping, parts of Paris have unfortunately witnessed riots that have become almost an annual event. However, media constructs make violence ‘normal’ in Beirut, justifying the lack of detailed coverage of the sufferings of people affected by the terror attacks.

A disclaimer relevant to Graham’s (2015) assessment is in order nonetheless: that the Lebanese group Hezbollah continues to be in combat with Israel, in aims of freeing southern Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms from Israeli military occupation, partly explains the violent image often associated with Beirut. As well, issues of meaningful access to the Beirut area due to resource barriers – be they authority restriction, language or otherwise – may have played a role in generating less-than-satisfactory coverage.

Even as factors such as cultural proximity continue to create disparities in the media coverage of terror attacks across the world, the need for a coordinated international effort to curb terrorism is highlighted in policy circles. What happens on the ground in Aleppo, Baghdad, Islamabad, and so on, profoundly influences events in London, Paris and New York, and vice versa. In an article titled ‘The global village of terrorism’, Mirahmadi (2010) argues,

It is essential that US policymakers learn the reality of what transpires in cities and villages across Pakistan [or any other country affected by terrorism] not only to properly understand that particular country, but because our national security depends on it.

Conclusion

In an era where the global village has increasingly served to approximate communication, international terrorism is in tandem defining policy parameters both domestic and foreign. This calls into question whether such facilitated connectivity across sparsely positioned peoples and nation-states is desirable. After all, it has come with a host of problematic ripple effects, not the least of which is facilitating communication among terrorist groups and thus the ideologies thereof and consequent bloodshed.

The raw reality of death caused by terrorism has inadvertently pushed terrorism to the very top of world concerns, indeed ailments, of the modern day. And although loss of life is not culture bound, but certainly impacts gravely across the board, cultural proximity is apparently alive and well, as comes through most fundamentally through the sheer contrast in the amount of coverage devoted to Paris versus Beirut. The study sought to investigate whether the global village we supposedly now live in (eroding connectivity borders between nations), yet with terrorism permeating geographic borders more than ever, ultimately makes a difference in how cultural proximity operates as a news value. The study’s answer clearly is a ‘no’, albeit a nuanced no, for even with Paris, the self-interest of the nation-state was prioritized, which (not surprisingly) indicates that on the international terrorism battleground, national security and welfare come first, followed by those of culturally proximate locales. Cosmopolitanism, which this study has posited as a potential alternative news value to cultural proximity, was not detected within the news material at hand, except for the humanitarian stance embraced by The New York Times’ editorial component vis-à-vis the Syrian refugee crisis. And in line with past literature, the emphasis on sensational violence detail was a news favourite whether the victims were Lebanese or French.

This study highlights that even in the day and age of ISIS and the erosion of communication borders across people and places, cultural proximity has not quite given way to cosmopolitanism, at least as far as news content projects. This is especially noteworthy given that the medium under study (The New York Times) is considered, in many ways, a mainstream cultural artefact of diversity and inclusiveness.

Future studies would do well to compare the media of countries other than the United States, perhaps even less politically potent and less involved in the global war on terror, to investigate whether similar patterns emerge. This may help illuminate whether the degree of both political leverage and conflict relevance influence the role of cultural proximity in shaping the news and in setting media agendas.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Amani Ismail is a lecturer in the Department of Journalism at the October University for Modern Sciences and Arts. She has worked at California State University–Northridge, Lindenwood University–Belleville and the American University in Cairo. Her primary research area is media and terrorism. Her publications have appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Journalism Studies, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journalism Practice, Media, War & Conflict and Communication, Culture & Critique, among others. She holds a BA in Journalism and Mass Communication from Iowa State University, an MS in Journalism from Ohio University, and a PhD in Mass Communications from The University of Iowa.

Smeeta Mishra is associate professor in the Business Ethics and Communication Group at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Previously, she worked at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and the Bowling Green State University, Ohio. She has published in the areas of media representations, online communication and gender studies in international peer-reviewed journals in her field. She has also co-authored a book titled Online Communication Strategies for Managers (McGraw-Hill Education). She holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from Syracuse University, and another MA from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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