Liberté, égalité, fraternité Beth Hale

On Wednesday evening, hundreds of Cambridge students and residents stood in solidarity with the victims of attacks in Baghdad, Beirut and Paris to condemn terrorism. In so doing, they expressed a universal right: a right to political self-expression, a physical, collective embodiment of so many debates in this university about the right to free speech.

That right has also manifested itself more subtly over the past week in the many discussions about an alleged media bias against victims of attacks that do not happen in wealthy, normally peaceful Western cities. It is not even that such attacks are more common in Beirut, the criticism goes, because the attack there was the most deadly since the end of the civil war in 1990. Some, as Lola Olufemi does in this newspaper, see racism at the root of the discrepancy – quite simply, that white lives matter more. Such arguments have drawn criticism of their own for being disrespectful to the dead in both attacks, and for making political points out of tragedy.

This charge misses the point. To expect anger and grief at a series of tragedies around the world to manifest themselves in the same form of ‘respect’ does a disservice to the right of political expression articulated at Wednesday’s rally. For those whose anger at events also touches on their anger at ingrained media biases and cultural stereotypes, we cannot call their anger disrespectful, as that is tantamount to denying the validity of their frustration more broadly.

But such an attitude also demands that those who choose to articulate their feelings and solidarity with the people of Paris by changing their Facebook profile picture be afforded the same courtesy. Nobody who makes that choice does so under the illusion that it makes a material contribution to the situation. But it does make an emotional one – both to those who choose to articulate their personal frustration, anger and grief in this way, and with those people in France who take comfort in seeing a wave of support across the globe.

This is not to say that criticism of Facebook is unwarranted for a political decision – the lack of a similar option for those affected by the tragedy in Lebanon arguably adds insult to significant injury. Facebook’s decision was a political one – a decision to make a broad statement about the significance of one event over countless others.

But we must also attempt to understand the many, complex reasons why some people might feel a greater emotional response for what happened in Paris compared to other events. Lebanon, for good or ill, is a far less significant presence on the media landscape in this country than Paris. Some of that is doubtless because of a homogenising, racialising coverage of a patchwork region of the world that emerges in the medium of “neutral” news reporting. But it is also to do with physical and cultural proximities and centuries of shared history; consumers of news are far more able to fill in the contextual gaps left by news reports because they have a greater awareness of what an attack in Paris means than an equivalent attack in Beirut. Of course, this is not necessarily a conscious decision.

Last Friday’s events are particularly clear in illustrating these discrepancies, and have forced us to interrogate our media’s practices at presenting news. It would be a great shame indeed if we did not use this opportunity for profound self-reflection.