When it Comes to Media Coverage of Drowned Refugees or Dead Gorillas, We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us

There’s an old black joke in the NGO world that goes like this: Never hold your famine or natural disaster in summer. North Americans are on vacation and aren’t paying attention.

It’s a harsh statement, but there’s a measure of truth in it. It’s hard to think about hungry people or refugees when we’re off to the beach.

Same goes for when a child falls into a gorilla enclosure at the zoo—especially if there is good video.

A lot has been said lately about how the drowning deaths of hundreds of people last week got almost no attention, but the gorilla and child dominated the media.

This is an old and hard truth about the media, and about the interests of North Americans—about us.

Fact is, a story like the one at the Cincinnati zoo will always trump a tragedy like the drowning of refugees, for several reasons.

One is that the war in Syria is now in its sixth year. It’s hard to keep anyone’s attention for that long.

Second is one person in danger versus thousands. It isn’t easy to wrap our minds around large numbers. We can much more easily relate to one child in danger closer to home.

Familiarity and proximity is a third reason. We all go to zoos like the one in Cincinnati, and the same thing could happen to us. (Although we hope not.)

But a main reason is that the media knows we care more about people who are closer to us and more like us.

It’s a normal human reaction—and it’s something the media has known this for a long time. (Even before the Web allowed them to know exactly what people clicked on and read.) 

In the 1960s, reporters at a major U.S. network put it more cynically with what they called the “Racial Equivalence Scale.”

The scale showed the minimum number of people who had to die in plane crashes in different countries before the crash equalled the death of one person closer to home.

According to the scale, “one hundred Czechs was equal to 43 Frenchmen, and the Paraguayans were at the bottom.”

(BBC journalists had a similar scale, in which “one thousand wogs, 50 frogs and one Briton” were equivalent.)

In other words, the media is only giving us what they know we want to pay attention to—something they know because we tell them every day by what we click on when we visit their websites.

And when it’s a contest between dead refugees, a dead rock star, or a dead gorilla, you know who is going to win.

None of this diminishes the tragic deaths of the refugees who drowned trying to get to Europe. But it does put it in perspective.

And it reminds us, in the words of the wise sage Pogo, that when it comes to what we see in the media, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

For more on this topic, see Why So Much News Coverage of Paris, but not Beirut? Maybe it's Time to Look in the Mirror and Why Your Brain Wants To Help One Person, But Not Millions, both on this blog.