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There's an exchange in an episode of "West Wing" in which the president of the United States is considering whether to intervene to stop genocide in an African country. And Jeb Bartlett asks his communications director, Will Bailey, "Why is it that a Kundanese life is worth less to me than an American life?”

“I don’t know sir, but it is,” he replies.

The exchange speaks to a reality in matters of international news. Some we pay attention to. Some we don't.

The social media aftermath of last week's attacks in Paris has followed a predictable route. People have reposted without questioning a news media slight of Lebanon, where a double suicide attack on Thursday killed dozens.

“When my people died, no country bothered to light up its landmarks in the colors of their flag,” Elie Fares, a Lebanese doctor, wrote on his blog, 

. “When my people died, they did not send the world into mourning. Their death was but an irrelevant fleck along the international news cycle, something that happens in those parts of the world.”

He's not wrong, of course. The attacks got scant attention. But is the blame the fault of the news media? Or is it 

, Martin Belam refutes the notion that we didn't care about the attacks because nobody told us about them. He posts links to the news stories that people chose to ignore.

The New York Times' Ann Barnard calls it the "compassion gap."

"Whatever the reasons—and there are many—for the disparity of global reaction, the message that emerges from these twinned events is that some lives matter more than others," 

Time's Aryn Baker, a former bureau chief in Beirut, writes

. ISIS is not just a French problem, or, if the ISIS claims to have downed the Russian airliner in Egypt are verified, a Russian problem. It is not just a Lebanese problem. Until there is some recognition that an ISIS attack on one country is an attack on all, ISIS will be everybody’s problem—a problem that won’t be solved."

One man’s hard lesson after the Eiffel Tower’s darkness was mistaken for a moving tribute

NewsCut

Bob Collins

Author

The social media aftermath of last week's attacks in Paris has followed a predictable route. People have reposted without questioning a news media slight of Lebanon, where a double suicide attack on Thursday killed dozens.


Why are some lives more important than others?

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