FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Media

The Parliament Hill Shooting Got Six Times More US Coverage Than the Quebec Mosque Attack

Why there’s no such thing as “under-reported” terrorism.

President Donald Trump's administration name dropped two terror attacks that happened on Canadian soil this week, but neither one was the recent mosque shooting that killed six worshippers in Quebec City. Instead, the White House inexplicably put out a list of 78 "under-reported" terror attacks on Monday, claiming they "did not receive adequate attention from Western media sources." (The list sadly left out Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway's imagined Bowling Green massacre.) Plenty of media have already weighed in by fact-checking the list and recounting in-depth coverage of the San Bernardino, Orlando nightclub, and Paris attacks. Which is a fine way to do journalism, I guess. But for longtime media critic Jim Naureckas, the list is too ridiculous to even justify with a response. "It's like complaining the Super Bowl was under covered," he told VICE. "To say that terror attacks are not covered enough, I mean, I suppose you could have entire channels devoted to nothing but terror attacks, but it's a fairly big theme in American media."

Advertisement

Read More: How Quebec Mosque Shooting Shows Holes in Canada's Gun Laws Trump's list happened to include the 2014 attack on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. As any Canadian with an internet connection will recall, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau managed to kill one soldier before being shot dead by authorities. Though certainly not the White House's intention, that case study does point to American media's uneven coverage of active shooters in Canada. Because Zehaf-Bibeau actually got about six times more US airtime as the recent Quebec mosque attack that killed six. A recent media analysis by Naureckas and his organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found many networks covered the Ottawa shooting far more than the Quebec City killings in the four days following the attacks. FAIR surveyed eight major outlets, comparing mentions of the perpetrators in each case. "We found the Ottawa attack got more coverage, sometimes much more coverage," Naureckas told VICE. ABC mentioned Zehaf-Bibeau in six stories during the first four days, compared to one mention of alleged white supremacist Alexandre Bissonnette. CBS covered the Ottawa shooter six times over the same period, while the Quebec City shooter was mentioned four times. CNN devoted 46 stories to the attack on Ottawa, with Anderson Cooper reporting live "on the ground." The same 24-hour network covered the deadly mosque shooting four times in as many days. Adding up more coverage from NBC, MSNBC, Fox, PBS and NPR, Naureckas found 88 mentions of the Ottawa shooter, and only 15 mentions of the shooting deaths of six Muslims. Granted, there are variables that can bend and shape media coverage of any world event. Zehaf-Bibeau pointed his gun at the nation's capital building on a weekday morning, and was shot down just a few paces from our most central halls of power (to make no mention of the closet-hiding PM). The mosque shooting happened on a Sunday evening, when American media already had their hands full with a slew of executive orders and protests.

Read More: Quebec Shooting Reminds Us Hate Is Not Imported But no matter which way you slice it, "one killed six times as many people as the other," says Naureckas. Quebec City should be a bigger story, and yet, it was the Ottawa shooter that got about six times the media spotlight.   What does this all mean? Media are playing a dangerous, racialized game with their editorial choices, according to Naureckas. With Zehaf-Bibeau swiftly branded a Muslim convert harbouring radical opinions about Middle East politics, the Ottawa shooting was perhaps an easy narrative to sink into—an outsider that hated the "dominant" culture. On the other hand, the slow and contradictory release of info from Quebec City, muddled by anti-Muslim truther conspiracies, was not as easy bait for American networks. "It's hard to escape the conclusion that the story isn't as big because the victims are Muslim, that Muslim life is not considered as important as Christian life," Naureckas told VICE. By the same token, he says on some level attacks by Muslims are generally seen as more threatening than people motivated by white supremacy. Naureckas made this assessment before Trump told Florida, of all places, that Islamic terrorism is "not even being reported" by "the very, very dishonest press." Clearly the White House is also aware of the perception of uneven coverage. To fight this perception from all sides of the political spectrum, Naureckas says media need to establish better standards for covering acts of political violence, similar to the standards established around covering suicide. "There's an idea that because crimes are committed to gain attention for a political cause, they should therefore be given a lot of attention. It doesn't make a lot of sense," he said. "I frankly think that terror is covered too much, that it should generally be covered along the lines of other crime stories." Copycat crime is not a new phenomenon, and neither is "suicide contagion." While media now take steps not to suggest suicide methods, they still tend to spotlight shooters and their motivations, though some outlets have shifted toward more victim-focused reporting. "It's pretty clear when you focus on acts of mass violence, you encourage other acts of mass violence. But there has not been the same kind of connection made, that maybe media should be reporting on these attacks in a different way."