Everyone is aware of the tragic terrorist attacks on Paris and Orlando, but did you know that the deadliest strike from ISIS (also known as ISIL, or the Islamic State) of 2016 occurred in Baghdad? According to Al Jazeera news, a suicide bombing on a busy street killed over 200 people in July of the past year.
This attack actually did receive a decent amount of coverage in the mainstream media, but if you compare it to the attacks in Paris and Orlando, where Facebook allowed people to change their profile picture to support those that we lost in those tragedies, Baghdad barely got any coverage on social media sites.
Now while the major news sources (Fox News, CNBC, New York Times, etc) do cover these types of attacks and post stories about them, the people who rely on social media as their main news source do not get to hear about these. Major news sources usually will only briefly mention it on their shows as well, so unless you are avidly looking on their websites, you will have no idea of what has been happening.
What I also find disturbing is that with a simple search of “Baghdad” on the Fox News website, I found out about a ton of bombings that have taken place in Baghdad since the new year. A bombing on New Year’s Eve killed 28 people, a car bomb in a market place killed at least 9 citizens on January 5th, and a suicide bomber killed 6 on January 8th. I had no idea about these bombings, and I think I watch and pay attention to the news more than most people my age.
Not only has Baghdad been subject to multiple acts of terror, but a recent bombing in Damascus killed seven people. There have been multiple attacks in Istanbul within the past year. ISIS militants even killed twenty people at a restaurant in Bangladesh within the past year. If attacks like these were happening to westernized countries, they would be all over the news and social media.
As far as using social media as a source of news information, I found Twitter to be the most updated on these attacks. I even found out about a bombing that happened in Baghdad on January 14th from Twitter, and I had not seen from searching on Facebook. I think the reason to this is that Twitter searches will sort their results by most recent posts, while Facebook goes by most popular posts.
For example; if I were to search “Baghdad Bombings” on Facebook, I would see plenty of sites and posts about the bombing in July that killed over 200 people, which also received a good amount of media coverage due to its high death toll.
Where if I search “Baghdad Bombings” on Twitter, I would see the most recent articles and posts about the most recent bombings. Of course, the only way you would find these without searching is if you followed people who blog about the area/issue or media sources from that side of the globe.
What I want to know is why are these attacks not being covered? Is it just because people are less likely to read about a bombing in Syria than a story about celebrities and congressmen skipping the upcoming Presidential Inauguration? While I understand that people will obviously care more about countries they live in or have connections to, and that attacks to these places hit harder to home, I’m just baffled that there is barely any coverage on the Middle East unless it is a large-scale carnage. Is it just because people feel like acts of terror in this part of the world are commonplace?
I want to be clear in stating that I don’t believe that we should not care about attacks that occur in places like Paris or Orlando or San Bernardino, I just think that we should also be aware of similar events around the world. While we should definitely give priority to events that happen to the United States, we should definitely not be turning away from places like the Middle East and the tragedies that occur there.
References
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/iraq-baghdad-bombings-kill-23-160703045945293.html
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/timeline-rise-and-spread-the-islamic-state
Terrorism in the 21st Century 
I definitely agree that the unequal coverage of terrorist attacks around the world creates a big problem of misperception for most of the population. I think it reflects a sort of narrow worldview in which we (Americans/the western word) see attacks against our government/people as a major threat to our values and what we stand for. On the other hand, we see attacks in the Middle East as less threatening, because their values and systems of government that are being attacked are different than ours. Rather than seeing it as an attack on a group of people, we see these instances as attacks on ideologies (Islam, democracy, capitalism, etc). This leads us to focus more attention on attacks against the US and our Western allies than attacks in the Middle East. Unfortunately, I think that this focus in the media on terrorism in the West only increases the tension between our two global regions and fosters intolerance of Muslims and middle eastern refugees/immigrants in the US and in Western Europe. This is especially true with the heavy reliance on social media as a news source as you mentioned in your blog.
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It took me a few minutes to find where to leave a comment! Good first blog post, Mike. I like that you incorporated the screen shots from social media to illustrate. Some of those points mentioned in the article you can also hyperlink to for next time.
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There is definitely an unequal distribution of what is covered in the media. Some stories of lesser relevance, unfortunately, get a lot more air-time than do stories that are way more deserving of being the headline. For instance, I, like you, had no idea about the multiple bombings in Baghdad just this year already! It is utterly baffling that people can die on one side of the world and no one on the other side of the world even knows about it. It just goes to show that the media truly is a profit driven business. They know they would get more views if they talked about, for example, celebrity drama than they would if they talked about the current situations going on in the Middle East. Overall, the media industry casts a narrow net of what the broadcasts to the US but, in my opinion, deaths of other people should definitely be put out there.
Jimmy Duvall
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Hi Mike,
This is an interesting topic especially recently because the media is definitely skewed in how they report on terrorist attacks. The coverage of the attacks on different areas vary among different forms of media and I feel like often times people seem to be more interested in certain countries over the others because of this. It was really interesting to see the screenshots of the searches from social media as well. It seems like some people will tend to be more interested in the attacks like the one in Paris because it isn’t as common as those in the Middle East. This kind of seems as though people just disregard it as a common occurrence in that area but maybe if it is reported as often as the individual attacks in other countries are then this could change. This goes to show how powerful social media has become in finding and sharing news and it could be argued that it is becoming stronger than other forms of news broadcasts recently.
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It is very troubling to realize that many terrorist attacks throughout the world go unreported in our media. I feel that the media simply just has very little regard for what is happening in some places. It truly shows how bias the media can be with what is being reported. Its all about what will get the most views and maximize profit. The media is more worried about trying to entertain viewers rather than report these awful tragedies that happen around the world. You definitely made a great point about the reports about bombings on Twitter. With all the independent bloggers and reporters on Twitter you are bound to stumble across a vast amount of stories that were probably unreported by the big media sources in the U.S. This shows how how much social media sites like Twitter can connect us and inform us about what is going on throughout the world.
-Austin De Tray
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