Global News Roundup Nov. 16-21

By Shy Hardiman

1)   A hostage standoff at a hotel in the Malian capital of Bamako ended on Friday after several hours. At least 20 people are believed to be dead and more than 100 hostages were rescued, some of whom suffered injuries. The Blue Radisson hotel where the attack occurred is located in an opulent neighborhood of Bamako and frequented by foreign nationals and diplomats. No information has been released connecting this incident with the ISIS-led attack in Paris earlier in November.

2)   The suspected leader of last week’s Paris attacks is believed to have died during a police raid outside the French capital on Thursday. Extremist Abdelhamid Abaaoud’s death comes in the wake of several raids that police have been conducting in an effort to capture the terrorists responsible for the Paris attacks that killed 129 and left more than 350 wounded.

Pedestrians walk down a busy street in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris where alleged ISIS attack ringleader was killed. Courtesy of WIkipedia.

3)   32 people died and another 80 were injured in a blast at a market in Nigeria on Tuesday. The suspected perpetrators are terrorist organization Boko Haram who sparked international upset and the #BringBackOurGirls movement after claiming responsibility for the kidnapping of 273 Nigerian school girls last year.

4)   A newborn was declared Guinea’s last known Ebola case on Monday. More than 11,000 people have died since last year during the West African Ebola outbreaks. Doctors are monitoring the child—whose mother died of the disease—and anyone who recently came into contact with him. Sierra Leone and Liberia were declared Ebola free earlier this year.

President Obama. Courtesy of Flickr.

5)   On Thursday, after representatives from the White House announced that President Obama had plans to veto a bill being pushed by the GOP, the House passed it. The bill enforces intensive security screening for refugees immigrating from war-torn areas. Several Republicans across the nation have expressed concern that the terrorists involved in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks were allowed access into France because they were disguised as Syrian refugees.

6)   France carried an airstrike over a city in Syria on Sunday. The bombing came just two days after terrorist group ISIS attacked seven different locations in Paris. French authorities targeted the Syrian city of Raqqa because it’s home to a jihadi training camp and an ISIS munitions dump.

The Ebola outbreaks in West Africa cause a ripple effect in American media

By Jessica Karins

In wealthy countries like Spain and the United States where the Ebola virus is beginning to take hold in a handful of cases, it’s just a disease. A disease with grotesque symptoms, yes, a disease that frightens people, but nonetheless, it’s purely a medical problem.

In West Africa, where the virus claims almost all of its victims, it’s another story entirely. There, it’s one symptom of an ongoing crisis that encompasses governments’ inability to care for their citizens, infrastructures and healthcare systems that dramatically underserve populations, and a world around them that isn’t interested in helping. In Africa, Ebola is a social disease.

As the first few Western cases have emerged, there’s an almost shocking disconnect present in the way the news media covers these two types of crisis.

One article in the LA Times referred to experts trying to stop the virus from spreading in the US as “leading the fight against history’s worst outbreak of Ebola”. For context, almost all of the virus’ nearly 7500 victims died in West Africa. There has probably been more news coverage of the dog Spanish officials decided to put down in case it spread the virus than their has been of any single African person who died of Ebola. Now that Ebola is happening to us, it’s suddenly front-page news.

What is the reason for this gap in coverage? What are we missing that prevents us from seeing each individual life lost as valuable, regardless of national origin?

It’s actually a symptom too – of a deep strain of racism and xenophobia in American culture that prevents us from seeing the deaths of those in other nations, especially those that are predominantly non-white, as equal in value.

There’s nothing like fear as a motivation for journalism, and as a motivation to read the news. Something like the Ebola virus provokes the understandable and human reaction of horror that something like this could happen here. So even when we don’t feel personally imperiled, it’s easier to feel a sense of injustice when the victim is someone like us.

If we want to create change, though, we have to do better.

There are thousands of tragedies like this happening all the time, and no one to tell those stories to the people with the power to help. It’s a breakdown all the way down the line – no leaders demanding more progress on the issue, no public invested in pressuring them to, no media to inform them of what it is that’s wrong.

As journalists, we have a responsibility to the public to help them empathize with stories that are distant and unfamiliar. We can’t expect most people to seek out this information, but it needs to be made available–in the form of front-page headlines and solemn opening segments on the nine-o’clock news. When we focus on only those stories that are already easy to understand, both for ourselves and our readers, we don’t help them understand anything new. Just as importantly, though, we fail the people who could benefit the most from having their stories told.

As the first vaccine trial for Ebola begins, we all need to ask ourselves why it didn’t happen sooner, and why now is the tipping point for change. None of us, whether scientists, journalists, or citizens, are free from bias. Whether or not this crisis becomes one the world shares, now is the time to ask how many lives our failures of empathy have taken, and how many more they may put at risk.