Our Narrow Lens American Mainstream Media Coverage Of International Terrorist Attacks

Our Narrow Lens American Mainstream Media Coverage Of International Terrorist Attacks http://www.columnf.com/ A year and three months before this, our screens played and replayed the video of American journalist Steven Sotloff’s death at the hands of the new “IT” crowd in terrorism, ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). In the same month, we saw the death of another American journalist, James Foley. For weeks we replayed the media, we shared articles and videos on Facebook, and re-tweeted our prayers for the victims and their parents on Twitter. For months, the United States mourned. We hung our heads in grief on the behalf of Paris when, just months after our reporters were killed, a French magazine office was shot up by Islamic terrorists. The “Je suis Charlie” cartoon had been posted, re-posted, liked, tweeted, re-tweeted, and favorited on screens across the United States. Our citizens identified with the need to assure the world that we would not be put down so easily, either. Ten months later, we lower our flags to half-staff as we grieve once again in solidarity with France. There is still new media regarding these attacks flashing across our screens, a week and one day later. There is a noticeable lack of terrorism-related deaths to those who are not natives of the United States or its allies, though. Or is there? According to The Guardian, on October 10, 2014, actually, ISIS publicly beheaded two men in Iraq. The victims were Raad Mohamed al-Azaoui, who was an Iraqi cameraman and photographer for Sama Salah Aldeen TV, and his brother, who remains unnamed. At least 15 other Iraqi journalists were killed between January and October of 2014 and nine were given a public ultimatum to either stop reporting and join ISIS or face execution. The Committee to Protect Journalists said that, at that time, more than 80 journalists had been kidnapped in Syria since 2011, and the number that had then been held by ISIS was approximately 20 journalists, most of them Syrian. According to Haaretz, Japanese reporter Kenji Goto had been killed by ISIS in February of this year. During a debate on Islam and free speech in Copenhagen, according to The Guardian, in February 2015, one person had been killed and three injured after terrorists had opened fire on the café in which the debate was being held. The victim had been a cartoonist who had received death threats for his caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. Images of these deaths, words about these victims, have not been broadcasted across America as news of the attacks on Paris and on U.S. journalists had been. These stories do not get shared on Facebook and Twitter. American mainstream media views the world through a narrow lens, and passes that worldview on to the American public. The message this sends is, “the only people whose deaths and lives are significant are those of Americans and natives of their allied nations.”