When the media kills the killers

‘Did the newspaper publications that were not running with the leading story miss the opportunity?’ asked Katie Katapodis. In reply, Professor Anton Harber agreed that the killing of cartoonists and two policemen in France was a leading story. 

Really? I asked myself. How does one arrive at the conclusion about what is a leading story?

France and South Africa are 12 966 kilometres apart. About 5 700 kilometres from South Africa, Ebola has claimed the lives of 8000+ people. About 21000+ people have contracted the haemorrhaging fever. It is not a leading story in South Africa, according to some media personnel.

In Nigeria, girl children have been abducted and no one knows what the rescue plan by the Nigerian authorities is. The insurgent Boko Haram is running amok. They are allegedly using girls as suicide bombers and in that way more people are being blown up.

Despite their long-standing and bloody skirmishes, which the media had not been treating as “leading story”, Boko Haram only got the spotlight when England and the U.S of America “threatened” to swoop into Nigeria to wipe the Borno State with Boko Haram’s lifeless bodies.

In a huff, President Goodluck Jonathan flew to London to “appear” alongside David Cameron. He looked so rattled that it took Cameron’s lingering hand-shake to pull him into a presidential pose for the cameras to do their business. It was that awkward. It was clumsy.

President Jonathan has been portrayed by the media as a smiling, cool-headed gentleman. And through the very media the world is mildly perturbed by his “soft” approach towards Boko Haram war-lords. Much has not been reported about his record of coordinating curfews and surveillance; of nabbing, jailing and reportedly torturing Boko Haram bandits in the Borno State.

The media is not telling the world what spawns Boko Haram, and they have not, for example, told the world that in Nigeria, the cartoons of Prophet Mohammad published in February 2006 by the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, provoked bloody riots which left 12 people dead and about 15 churches destroyed.

Back to France. Is it not bizarre, that satirists can ridicule another religion and our media shrugs and concludes that this is media freedom?

But those like Juan Cole, who hold a different view about what caused the attacks, posit that the killings are coordinated plan by those who want to force France to indiscriminately harden their attitude towards settler-Muslims in that country. He says…

‘This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram term deriving from wordplay involving scrambling of letters).’

Perhaps there is truth in that. But what about Charlie Hebdo’s continuing provocation towards another religion? Ariel Sheron used the killings as an opportunity to appeal to the French-based Jews to return to Israel for their protection. He was not asking everyone to stop provocations and killings. He simply offered to protect the “proxy provocateurs”. The utter verbal and political recklessness by him went past our media without rebuke from it. 

To condemn the killings, the French took to the streets. I would probably do the same if I enjoy the Charlie Hebdo’s racist, sexist and homophobic “freedom of speech.” This “heroic” act by the French citizens has inspired some African leaders, who are beholden to France, to do what President Jonathan did with England - appearing in front of cameras in show of solidarity with a colonial mother country against “a common enemy.”

And this swift and coordinated act of mocking the religion of “killers” is, according to our media, a leading story, because this time the gun is pointing at them. The media is free, they argue, to kill the religion of killers.