There has been much debate, in the wake of the horrifying attacks in Paris last Friday night, about which stories the media assigns importance to, and which it doesn't. Much of this debate has focused on an Islamic State-organised suicide attack in Beirut the day before, which killed more than 40 people but received far less attention. While it's simply not true, as some have claimed, that the media ignored this event-it was covered by almost all the major UK media outlets-it's fair to say it received far less air time and fewer column inches than the attacks the following day in Paris. There are many reasons why this might be the case. But we shouldn't just be looking at how much the media covers different stories—we should also be looking at the way in which it covers them, and the language it employs.
As journalists, we have to choose our words carefully. Columns and op-eds explicitly express an opinion. News stories, by contrast, look like they're describing facts; but the use of language always involves an element of interpretation.
This point was brought to the fore this summer as what had originally been described as the “migrant crisis” was relabelled by many publications as the “refugee crisis.” The idea was that semantics matters: referring to those arriving in Europe as "refugees" makes it clear to readers that they are coming to escape war and violence; refer to them as “migrants”—a broader word which doesn't include the driving force behind their movement—and that nuance is lost. This maps on to a distinction favoured by politicians, and many others, between refugees (subtext: worthy of our sympathy) and “economic migrants” (subtext: trying to steal our jobs and benefits). Barry Malone, online editor for Al Jazeera, one of the first publications to clearly make the switch in terminology, wrote that the word “migrant” had become “a tool that dehumanizes and distances, a blunt pejorative.” Why say that “thousands of migrants” drowned in the Mediterranean, he asks, when you could say “thousands of people?”
The use of the word “crisis” has been less widely questioned, but this too is an interpretation. There are two million refugees in Turkey; 25 per cent of Lebanon's population is made up of refugees; and Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan has almost as many residents as Bath. We've known about the plight of the Syrian people ever since the war began in 2011, but it only became a “crisis” once they started arriving on the shores of Europe.
Sometimes we become aware of the implications and complications of the language we use; the danger is when we don't. Many of the news stories about Thursday's attack in Lebanon reported on a double suicide bombing in the “Hezbollah stronghold” of Burj al-Barajneh, an area of Beirut. From the BBC, for example: “The Islamic State militant group says it was behind the attacks in Burj al-Barajneh, a mainly Shia southern suburb and Hezbollah stronghold.” And from Reuters: “At least 43 people were killed... in Beirut's southern suburbs, a stronghold of the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah.” Many other publications followed suit, some using the term in their headlines. The point is to give the reader some explanation of why that particular neighborhood might have been targeted: Hezbollah militants, who have a strong presence there, are fighting IS in Syria.
So it wasn't until a Lebanese friend posted on Facebook decrying the use of the term that I stopped to think about its implications. “Burj al-Barajneh isn't a Hezbollah stronghold,” she wrote. “It is a Lebanese neighborhood, a densely-populated civilian area mostly inhabited by members of the working class. 'Stronghold' is a term with militaristic connotations. Calling Burj al-Barajneh a 'Hezbollah stronghold' decivilianizes the victims.” The readers' sympathy is reduced because the language used implies the victims' association with a militant group, or presents the region in which they lived as a militarised one in which casualties are inevitable. (This is one reason, it is argued, why the Beirut attack has received less coverage than Paris: in the western mind, such tragedies are expected in the Middle East, but not in the heart of Europe). What the term "Hezbollah stronghold" does not bring to mind is the unexpected slaughter of innocent civilians going about their daily lives—shopping, eating, drinking—in the middle of a residential area of a beautiful and cosmopolitan city; but that is what it was.
Hezbollah's presence in the area may well be relevant to the attack, but there are more nuanced and, above all, accurate ways of providing that information. The New York Times described Burj al-Barajneh as follows:
“Hezbollah maintains tight security control in the district that was hit, and the bombing seemed aimed at hurting the group by attacking civilians in an area where it has many supporters. But the stricken area also typifies working-class Beirut, where Palestinians, Christians and Syrian refugees (mostly Sunnis) live, work and shop.”
News stories which referred simply to an attack on a “Hezbollah stronghold” failed to do justice to the victims. Here, they are re-civilianized and re-humanized. It is interesting that much of the reporting on Paris has emphasized the individual humanity of the victims: what they were wearing and doing, who they were, the grief of their loved ones, their hopes for the future—things that help us, as readers, connect with the victims in a way that rarely happens in coverage of similar tragedies in far off lands.
The advent of internet news means that reporters have to turn out their work frighteningly quickly: there is rarely time to analyse our language as much as we should. And words are a precious commodity: editors make sure we keep our articles short because there is only so much space available on the page, and readers are busy and don't want to read a paragraph when a phrase would do. But for that very reason we must make sure we choose our words wisely, and readers should make sure to read with a critical eye.
