Combs asks the pertinent question

Over at Combs Spouts Off, he compares the coverage in the media of the current Lebanese conflict with the earlier Israeli attacks on Hizbullah positions:

The story goes on to describe the rocket fire, the heavy bombardment of the "camp" on Thursday, the number of soldiers killed, and various tactical and other matters. Reuters has a similar story with similar pictures.

Reading these and other recent reports has made me wonder about some things.

The Lebanese army is fighting jihadists holed up in civilian neighborhoods, just as the Israelis did last year, and the Lebanese artillery and tank attacks seem much less restrained and precise. Why is the coverage so different? The AP story quoted above is 18 paragraphs long, and it isn't until the 17th and 18th paragraphs that civilians are mentioned [. . .]

It's an illustration that all deaths are not equal in the eyes of the western media: it's far more newsworthy if the deaths are caused, directly or indirectly, by Israeli (or US/Western European) troops. Internecine fighting doesn't get the same focus on either civilian casualties or destruction of towns and villages. You could argue that this is caused by anti-American/anti-Israeli biases, but it could equally be reflective of the audiences in the west: as Stalin is reported to have said, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." This is even more so when the many deaths are far away (by distance or by cultural vectors).

Bad news sells, as everyone in the media understands full well, but bad news close to home out-sells bad news from further away.