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Saturday’s attack in Mogadishu was the deadliest terrorist attack in Somalia’s history as well as one of the deadliest terrorist attacks anywhere in the world for many years. At least 300 people have been killed and countless more have been injured, many catastrophically so. By any objective measure, the attack is one of the most important stories this week, if not this month. And yet, what we are seeing is an utter lack of attention and concern for the event and its victims amongst our peers as well as a level of media coverage disproportionate to the severity of what happened.

In the past, when arguments similar to this have been made criticising how people respond to faraway tragedies, the common retort has been that our responses, or lack thereof, are to be expected because of how we are wired as human beings to care mostly about things that happen in our proximity.

The psychologist C. Daniel Batson calls this the “empathy-altruism hypothesis”: the notion, widely supported in the social scientific fields, that our capacity as human beings to put ourselves in the shoes of others is what drives our emotional responses to others’ plight. The implication being that we can only care about others to the extent that we can empathise with them – and, of course, our empathy is limited, therefore we prioritise those closest to us. It should therefore not be controversial that people care more about things happening in their own communities or countries than things happening outside of these groups.

Such an argument must be recognised for what it is: a lazy attempt to defend the way things are. For nothing about why we respond the way we do is relevant to the question of how we should in fact respond. If we are to be serious about the idea that all lives matter equally, regardless of where these people are, the colour of their skin or what culture they subscribe to, then surely it is time to rid ourselves of any status quo bias and point out that it is not defensible to have different levels of concern for different tragedies dependent on where they occur. Even if we assume that our ability to respond appropriately to events according to their magnitude is rendered imperfect because of flaws in our cognitive makeup and limitations in our reservoir of empathy, the crucial question that we must then answer is whether such flaws are bugs or features of our moral calibration. I know which answer I prefer.

But even then, the hypothesis fails to explain what we are seeing in reality which is that proximity, at least geographical proximity, is not the core determinant of whether or not someone has a visceral emotional response to a tragedy somewhere in the world. Las Vegas is 5,217 miles from London, Mogadishu is 4,309 miles – yet people’s response to the two events could not have been more different. It is clear therefore that something other than geographical proximity is governing our responses; some other dimension of proximity or similarity is at play. Much ink has been spilt debating the contentious question of what exactly this might be, whether it be cultural similarities or historical ties, but this is not the place for me to give my take on this issue. What I would suggest is for all of us to do some honest introspection and ask ourselves whether our lack of visceral emotional response to Saturday’s attack is borne out of benign limitations in our psychology or something more sinister.

Another retort commonly put forward is that we do not care as much about faraway tragedies like the attack in Somalia simply because there is so little we can do about it, either now or in the foreseeable future. The argument follows that news outlets recognise this fact and therefore demote big but distant news stories and put in their place stories which are, in their view, more amenable to be influenced by their audience.

The BBC News front page this morning (Screenshot)

This is another fallacious line of argument. For a quick glance at the BBC News front page this morning will reveal that the article covering one of the most lethal terrorist attacks anywhere in the world in recent times was shunted to the sidebar where it was not even afforded the luxury of a thumbnail picture or a description (the article is no longer on the front page). This would of course be justified if the articles that the BBC does afford these luxuries to are bigger and more important stories – or as the retort posits, stories that their audience might be able to influence now or in the future.

So what are these stories that the BBC implicitly attributes a higher importance to? Of the five featured stories on the front page this morning, here are three of them: a story about a hurricane, news of a comedian’s death and finally, the salt in the wound, coverage of a crackdown on chocolate in hospitals. If someone would like to tell me how any of these stories deserve to be ranked higher in importance by the BBC than the story about Somalia, whether it is because they are bigger, more relatable or more amenable to be influenced by their audience – I would love to hear it. Surely hundreds of people dying in a terrorist attack is more important than one comedian’s death; surely there is more we can do to prevent the next major terrorist attack in Somalia than a hurricane in Ireland.

Perhaps you remain unconvinced. After all, it’s been two days since the attack – the BBC did have the story of the Somalia attack in a more prominent position on its front page yesterday. But then the question still remains as to why there was rolling live coverage on the front page across several days in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting and not in the aftermath of Saturday’s attack in Somalia – both tragic events, no doubt, but one clearly deserves much more of our attention and the media’s coverage than it is being afforded.

The fact is that not only is one of the most world-renowned news organisations failing to uphold its responsibility to engage in news prioritisation and to deliver its audience the most important stories at all times, it is in fact guilty of contributing to the mass indifference and apathy we are seeing amongst our peers today. Bear in mind also that my choice of the BBC as the centrepiece of this critique is not driven by any bias against the institution, but rather by my expectation, now dashed, that we would at least get fair coverage of Saturday’s attack in Somalia by a news organisation that has the special privilege of not being reliant on commercial revenue or user clicks to operate.

But of course, there are two assumptions that underpin this entire critique: that news organisations rank their stories according to their importance, and that consumers of the news want to see the most important stories first. Perhaps it is naïve of me to think that these assumptions hold true in reality.

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