Uncensored or insensitive: the media response to the Garissa massacre

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n the 2nd of April, gunmen stormed Garissa University College in Kenya and massacred 147 students. While most people are aware of the shooting, the coverage in popular media was disgracefully short-lived. Although people weren’t exposed to column inches, they may have seen the shocking photographs of the massacre, showing the uncensored bodies of the victims.

The lack of media coverage troublingly echoes a January incident in which 2,000 villagers were slain in Baga, Nigeria by terror group Boko Haram. Despite the bloodshed, the incident was overshadowed by the Charlie Hebdo shootings, occurring just days after them.

Western media has been rightly accused of treating the deaths of non-Westerners with unequal respect. The widespread, although brief, coverage Jordanian pilot Moaz Kasasbeh’s execution at the hands of Islamic State militants in February came as a surprise, as the deaths of previous non-white hostages Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto the previous month had gone virtually unnoticed in comparison to their American and English counterparts. This double standard was also evident in the mainstream news coverage of the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, wherein reporters refrained from commenting against the police to avoid controversy. At this time, social media lead the international charge for justice.

Once again, these platforms are rallying for the popular media to recognise the 147 Kenyan lives lost. The issue with this very worthy cause is the method.

While social media is a fantastic mouthpiece for independent, uncensored debate, providing us ‘regular people’ with a recognisable voice in the public sphere, a criticism that isn’t raised enough is the inevitable reduction of information into easily consumable, bite sized chunks. This often results in underdeveloped comment and in this case, shock tactics. The intention behind the spread of the pictures is to raise awareness, but it fails to respond effectively to the problem. The misguided ‘tribute’ doesn’t inform its audience on the massacre, content with simply saying it happened.

Moreover, the users sharing these pictures are unwittingly partaking in the crimes they chastise the mass media for: the disrespect of non-white, non-First World lives. Returning to the Islamic State executions, the videos of the European and American victims were rarely shared on these platforms, due to the generally accepted belief that it isn’t appropriate to commemorate a person’s life through their murder.

Instead, the victims of the Garissa massacre have been objectified by well-meaning individuals on the internet. Whereas the loss of life should be respectfully mourned, the students have become a voiceless vehicle for a cause.

The counter-argument to this belief is that consumers of mass media should confront the reality of the tragedy. But this shouldn’t be done by devaluing the deceased or reducing the tragedy to a message. Although information in this form is easily consumable, it rarely encourages discussion or opinions to fully form. As much as social media is the ‘voice of the people’, the pictures feed a cultural obsession with barbarity, removing the humane, intellectual element from appropriate media coverage.
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Photo: flickr/nomadnewyork