CounterSpin interview with Jim Naureckas on ISIS Attacks
Janine Jackson interviewed Jim Naureckas about media coverage of ISIS terrorism for the November 20 CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Jim Naureckas (photo: Janine Jackson)
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Janine Jackson: The Paris attacks were barely over before people began using them for their own purposes. They were a reason to reject Syrian refugees, though no refugees appear to be implicated. They were a reason to increase government surveillance, although the suspects were already on the French government’s radar and there’s no indication more surveillance would have made any difference. Some even used the attacks as a cause to demean antiracism activists on college campuses.
But many people also asked whether this violence might finally cause us to consider how the war on terror may foment, rather than prevent, such acts, as well as raised questions as to the media’s selective attention to violence around the world and what our guest terms the “weaponization of grief.” Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR’s website and our newsletter Extra!. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jim Naureckas.
Jim Naureckas: Great to be back.
JJ: No one wants to be part of a suffering Olympics, but is there something to be said about the differing ways that media have directed our attention and our sympathies in the wake of various violent acts over the last couple of weeks?
JN: It is kind of a natural experiment, where you have one group carrying out similar attacks in a short period of time against very different targets, and against targets that have very different values in the US media system. You have the Paris attacks, but just before that there was a twin bombing in Beirut carried out by ISIS, and shortly before that ISIS apparently brought down a Russian plane over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. And by looking at how these stories were covered, you see a lot about what the US media bring to the story, how their ideology and preconceptions change, how they present what are in some ways very similar events.
JJ: We saw how the Paris attack was covered; it was the front page and top of the news for days, and continues to be; everyone on Facebook changed their icon to the French colors. How does that compare to, for example, the attack in Beirut, which immediately preceded the Paris attacks?
JN: Well, that was treated as an incident of passing notice. The New York Times published a story on page 6 and, interestingly, at one point, the headlines at the New York Times referred to it as an attack on a “Hezbollah Stronghold.” And you saw this kind of terminology in media, referring to the suburb that was attacked as “Hezbollah bastion” or “Hezbollah area,” as if by bombing a marketplace in Beirut, ISIS was somehow striking a blow against a rival militant group. It actually, as the New York Times story noted–the justification issued by ISIS was that they were Shia: They were the wrong kind of Muslim, that was the main reason they had to die.
JJ: Some people did compare the way media treated the attacks in Paris with the attack in Beirut, but the response from some quarters in the media was to say, “Well, you can’t blame reporters for that, it’s really just people. People don’t care as much about what happens in Beirut as they do what happens in Paris.” Kind of blaming the people for it. What do you make of that?
JN: There’s a sense you get, when corporate journalists are being defensive: They think that if you just say something once that you’ve done your job, and no one can complain about the relative amount of coverage that you give something. In comparison to the one story that this got on Page A6, there were up to 20 stories a day on the Paris story, numerous stories on page 1. Clearly the mainstream media are signaling with the amount and with the placement of the story that this is a story that you should care about , and they are equally signaling that the Beirut story is one that you should not be interested in.
JJ: We can say that the attack in Beirut got less coverage than the Paris attacks, but if we compare the coverage of Paris to the coverage of the Russian plane that was bombed and went down, that was not just a lack of attention; it was a particular quality of media attention.
JN: Yeah, it was very striking, when we went back and looked at the coverage, how the media were blaming Russia for having ISIS blow up one of its planes. The New York Times listed the bombing of the plane as among the bad things that happen to Russia as “direct results of Mr. Putin’s actions,” the Russian president, and the Times was mocking Russians because their “basic reactions was to shrug and point a finger elsewhere, particularly at the West.”
Now, the reason that Putin was to blame for the bombing of the Russian plane by ISIS was because Russia has been bombing ISIS targets in Syria, just as France has been doing. France and Russia have been doing the exact same thing. ISIS has had the same reaction, which is to attack civilians in the country that is bombing them, and in one case this shows how reckless and foolish the Russians are, and in the other case it barely comes up when you are talking about France. It’s very difficult to see the cause-and-effect relationship between the French attacking this violent group in Syria and the group striking back by attacking civilians in France. It’s like it would be rude to mention that there is a consequence to French foreign policy.
JJ: It’s not, of course, to justify terrorist acts; it’s really just to help us understand them, to get beyond the idea that they are random and out of nowhere, when in fact they occur in a context.
JN: Yeah, it certainly is not to say that the response is justified. But to understand the world that you live in, you need to actually discuss the actual motivations of the actors in it, and not pretend that their actions are completely inexplicable and can only be understood in terms of some kind of religious insanity.
JJ: So when we read coverage that says the French capital is stunned, wondering ‘Why us?,’ that is the kind of context free coverage that you are talking about.
JN: The French have been the primary supporters in Europe for the overthrow of the Syrian government, and it has created a state of civil war in Syria that created the opening for ISIS to have a base, to have a territory, along with the invasion of Iraq by the United States, which opened up a similar space in Iraq. And the idea that there is connection between French intervention in the Middle East and the creation of this dangerous organization that is killing people in France is really off the table; it’s not something that you can talk about, because it would be callous to interfere with the grieving process by talking about French actions. And this is kind of what I mean by talking about the “weaponization of grief,” is that you can justify any response to a tragedy by acting as though there is no precedent for it. And so the response to the violence in France can be more French violence in the Middle East, even though there are reasons to believe that the previous French violence in the Middle East started a chain of events that led to the slaughter in Paris.
JJ: This idea of putting acts into a political context and drawing some connection between what a country does and what is done to it – it’s not that media never do it, they do do it in some situations, don’t they?
JN: Shortly after the bombing of the Russian plane, there was an AP piece sort of speculating about whether terrorism could have been behind it, and the AP article said that if it was terrorism, “many Russians could reconsider the wisdom of the country’s airstrikes in Syria.” It’s interesting that that is a possibility that is offered by corporate media to the citizens of Russia, but is not offered to the citizens of France. And, in a way, if you want coverage of your government that you can use as a citizen, that allows you to consider the actions of your government as something that has consequences in the real world, you may be better off living under a government that the US media considers to be an enemy than to live in a country that they think of as a friend.
JJ: And it would seem even less likely to get that kind of critical treatment of US foreign policy.
JN: No, that is the main thing that you will not get from US media coverage.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jim Naureckas; he’s editor of our website and our newsletter Extra!. Thanks very much Jim Naureckas for joining us this week on CounterSpin.