“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here” (Part One)

Media Coverage of Boston Marathon Bombing

There is a cliff-hanger at the end of the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s television series The West Wing. As President Bartlet is leaving the building in which he has just given a campaign speech, shots ring out – and we fade to black. We learn in the first episode of Season Two that there has indeed been a shooting and the president has been slightly injured; a key staff member has, however, been critically wounded. Naturally, there is a great deal of news hype around the incident (the target was not the president but his African-American valet), and Bartlet’s press secretary C.J. Cregg is kept busy providing updates on the president’s condition, the staff member’s condition, and the manhunt for the suspects.

But in one of her briefings, C.J. gives the sensational-starved press corps a little perspective by pointing out that while “it would be easy to think that President Bartlet, Joshua Lyman, and Stephanie Abbott were the only people who were victims of a gun crime last night, they weren’t. Mark Davis and Sheila Evans of Philadelphia were killed by a gun last night. He was a biology teacher, and she was a nursing student. Tina Bishop and Belinda Larkin were killed with a gun last night; they were 12. There were 36 homicides last night, 480 sexual assaults, 3,411 robberies, 3,685 aggravated assaults, all at gunpoint. “

While C.J. was making a point about gun control, there is clearly another truth contained in the statistics she cites: the story of greater value – in this case the tragic impact of gun violence on average Americans every single day – is most often lost in the noise surrounding an incident that involves a celebrity or an incident that occurs at a public event.

I have long been sceptical of the journalistic values of the new media, particularly television network news. And I have been thinking recently of one real-life example of C.J.’s comments: the Boston Marathon bombings, which occurred on April 15, 2013. Three people died in the bombings; some 264 were injured. In addition, a police officer was allegedly killed by one of the bombers, and a suspect died in a shootout with police. The bombings and the subsequent manhunt resulted in the evacuation of buildings, the closing down of a large area around the site of the attacks, the restriction of airspace, the cancellation or postponement of sport and cultural events, and numerous other emergency precautionary measures.

News coverage of the event was immediate, massive, and sustained, resulting in outpourings of sympathy from around the world; the victims, as well as first responders, were honoured at various events throughout the rest of the year; by November, One Fund, a charity established by Boston mayor Thomas Merino to aid the victims of the bombing, had raised $71 million.

On the same day in April, 75 people died and 356 were injured in a series of bombings and shootings in Iraq. The following day 22 people were killed in suicide bombings in Pakistan; 49 were injured. In 2013 there were 40 homicides in the city of Boston (down from 58 in 2012); in only 16 of these homicides were suspects identified. None of these incidents, apparently, merited the level of coverage afforded the Boston Marathon bombing.

The power of stories such as that of the Boston Marathon to continue to deliver traction for news organizations is demonstrated by the massive coverage of the one-year anniversary of the incident and, two years after the bombing, of the trial and subsequent sentencing – to death – of the surviving perpetrator, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Tsarnaev’s youth, his foreignness, his Islamic faith, and the fact that there is “no death penalty for state crimes” in Massachusetts and that “residents overwhelmingly favored life in prison for Mr. Tsarnaev” (he was tried on federal charges) only served to intensify the drama of the trial.

There is no question that the Boston Marathon bombings constitute a tragedy; any time life is lost or injury sustained in senseless violence a tragedy has occurred. One does wonder, however, why an incident in which only three people died required such extensive news coverage, while other issues of human suffering – homelessness, domestic violence, youth suicide, poverty – with equally tragic results receive little national, regional, or local air time.

None of us is naïve enough not to believe that the television networks are aware, thanks to billions of dollars spent on market research, of what kinds of incidents and events merit the level of coverage given to the Boston Marathon bombings. They know that their breaking news stories will spark conversations in work places, bars and restaurants, schools and colleges, faith communities, and so on, conversations which will cause millions of people to turn on their television sets to learn what all this is about and to keep those sets tuned to this or that network in response to highly effective manipulation of their emotions. So we can pretty confidently say that network executives see increased viewership, and thus increased ratings and revenues, when these incidents occur. They also know exactly how much mileage they can get out of the incident before toning down the coverage and moving on to other news stories. 

It can be argued that news coverage of this incident led to tens of millions of dollars in aid donated to the victims, and such an argument would not be without merit. But we might also argue that few, if any, of the other victims of violence in Boston – or anywhere else in the United States – in 2013 received such beneficence. Were they not equally in distress and deserving of aid?

News organizations depend on our uncritical consumption of such stories as the Boston Marathon bombing and on their ability to manipulate our emotions through carefully selected imagery, sound bites, and the testimony of victims, bystanders, and “experts” of all kinds, in order to sell the products that are advertised during the coverage of such tragic spectacles. In the meantime, as our attention is focused on these tragic events, the larger ongoing tragedies – homelessness, the dominance of gun culture, economic and racial inequality, among many others – go virtually unremarked. The very fact that they are ongoing, the everyday reality of existence, relegates them to the realm of the banal, less worthy of our attention than spectacular events like the Boston Marathon bombing.

Image Credit

“Kendall Coffey on MSNBC’s Morning Joe (2)”, by Kendall Coffey. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

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• The Film-School Student Who Never Graduates: A Profile of Ang Lee, Part Two
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