The mainstream media ignored Delara Darabi. New media didn’t.

by Guest Contributor Nisha Chittal, originally published at Politicoholic

Early Friday morning in Tehran, 23-year-old Delara Darabi was executed in the Rasht prison in Iran for a crime that happened when she was 17. Human rights groups had been protesting and trying to save her from execution for months, since it is a violation of international law to execute anyone for a crime that occurred when they were a minor. Despite the protests, Iranian authorities executed her on Friday with no notice.

What is perhaps the saddest part of her story, however, is that the mainstream, traditional news media did not report the story at all. A Google News search on Delara Darabi revealed, as of [May 2nd], a total of ZERO mainstream US news stories. The only stories about Delara as of last night were from Iranian and international sources, blogs, and human rights groups.

Today, the mainstream media started to pick up on it, with stories from the Los Angeles Times, BBC, United Press International, New York Times, and a few others. Still, at the time of writing this post there are only 206 news stories about Delara Darabi’s unjust execution. By comparison, there are currently 762 news stories about Matthew McConaughey, and 7,078 news stories about Arlen Specter.

So, how, you might ask, did word of the story first break? Who reported it first? The answer is: Darabi’s execution was first reported on Twitter. And then the first media outlet to pick up the story was none other than the epitome of new media, BreakingTweets.com, a news site which reports stories from around the world using Twitter for breaking news. BreakingTweets isn’t run by seasoned news pros, either — its founder and head is Craig Kanalley, a twentysomething journalism grad student trying to revolutionize the way we get our news, through the use of new media.

Breaking Tweets was paying attention to the Delara Darabi story, and they reported it more than a full 24 hours before the mainstream media.

Delara Darabi’s story should be seen as a case study of some of the challenges with our media system as it stands today:

Ethnocentrism still reigns supreme: stories with an “American” angle – like the imprisonment of American journalist Roxana Saberi in Iran – are more important than similar stories, like Delara Darabi’s, without the American angle. With Roxana Saberi, international media attention has been fierce — and because of that, so has international pressure on Iranian authorities. Had Delara Darabi had that kind of attention, she could have had a very different fate. But she didn’t get that attention – because she’s not American.

And new media won major points. Old media types who rail against new media, such as NYT’s Maureen Dowd and Matt Bai, who spent last week complaining about Twitter, should take note: the New York Times was shamefully far, far behind Twitter and new media in picking up this story.

Where are our media’s priorities? What is driving them to choose to write 7000+ of the same stories on Arlen Specter, and almost nothing about the international law-violating execution of an innocent young Iranian woman?

Perhaps it is because human rights stories just don’t sell as much as stories about high-intensity partisan clashes or Hollywood actors. Human rights stories, particuarly world news, may sell less copies or bring in few page views. But news isn’t supposed to be about the profit motive — it’s supposed to be about educating and informing the masses about the world around them. If the press is to act as an arbiter of what is news, they should be reporting on what matters, rather than more banal stories about the White House puppy or Michelle Obama’s garden.

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Comments

akki wrote:

agreed. thank you for this post. i subscribe to email alerts from Human Rights Watch which is how I found out about Delara Darabi within a few days of a her murder. it’s a shame that human rights, which inevitably affects us all, is pushed to the back seat in MM while sensationalized and mindnumbing rubbish take the wheel. fortunately there are more and more alternative and well-rounded news sources thanks to the i-net; but sadly those few views are from those who care enough to know what’s going on around them…can’t speak for others.

Posted 21 May 2009 at 1:22 pm ¶
Fatemeh wrote:

I loved this when I read it. Nisha’s analysis is spot on.

Despite the attention of new media, however, I am still stunned by mainstream feminist blogs who didn’t report on her execution. Muslimah Media Watch was the first feminist blog to report on it, and I didn’t see many others.

Posted 21 May 2009 at 1:36 pm ¶
Evan wrote:

The corporate media will only publicize cases when it involves a young woman of Western origin. The media builds a fetish with these international “damsel in distress” scenarios.

If Roxana Saberi wasn’t raised in the United States, she probably would have been executed in the end. The US citizenship saved her life.

Anyway, the most telling example of Western media ignorance was the Schapelle Corby case. Here was an attractive, young, white Australian citizen who was suspected of smuggling narcotics into Indonesia. She was found guilty and sentenced to a harsh prison term of 20 years for possession. She could have received the death penalty. As a result of her trial and sentence, the Australian media went completely nuts with the coverage. The media repeatedly slammed the Indonesian justice system and they were amplifying the allegation that Schapelle Corby was framed. There were public demonstrations against Indonesia all over the country.

There was another infamous case involving a Filipino citizen who was executed for smuggling narcotics into Indonesia. His story received no publicity in Western media circles. This was a serious human rights violation because the brutal sentence did not fit the crime. I guess the Aussie media wasn’t interested in his plight. No one cares about the draconian drug laws in southeast Asian countries unless a pretty, white female gets swept up in the legal firestorm. I can’t imagine how many Indonesian citizens have spent the bulk of their adult lives incarcerated in horrible conditions because of drug possession charges.

Posted 21 May 2009 at 2:10 pm ¶
D.C. Lurker wrote:

Thank you for your post. You’re right on several points, especially “mainstream” journalism’s banal pursuits as of late, but I’ll venture to say that the “ethnocentrism” of which you write, what I’ll call “U.S. myopia,” is endemic to media in other countries as well. That is, media outlets are primed to focus on “their own” first. At the micro-level, you see this even at U.S. local newspapers (the ones we have left), with tension between placement of national stories against those that are of immediate interest to surrounding communities, and subgroups within those communities. Thus, I wasn’t surprised by Big Media’s interest in Ms. Saberi’s story, and given the strained chess match between the U.S. and Iran right now, it’s more than a notion that a shift in that region’s power balance looms large.

Don’t get me wrong, though: none of this absolves U.S. media companies from backsliding on more comprehensive, less U.S.-centric international coverage. But keep in mind that Tribune Co., The Wall Street Journal, the company formerly known as Knight Ridder, and others have all shut foreign bureaus because they became cost prohibitive — the end result of corporate environments that succumbed to investment mismanagement, crushing demands for astronomical profit margins (along with some leaders’ propensity to raid the executive compensation cookie jar), failing to listen reporters’ ideas, and top management’s strange aversion to pulling the trigger on innovation (and true diversity within their ranks, in some cases).

Still, I can’t say that I haven’t seen strong international coverage or opinion writing from domestic outlets in years past, because I have. I’ve read Foreign Policy magazine, the Washington Post’s newest property, for years. IMHO, it has run circles at times around some U.S. news sources I monitor, along with papers from other countries. But rather than lament the need for greater flexibility within our traditional, recessive, shape-shifting media constructs — perhaps fellow lurkers in hypersegmented Internet communities should work harder to connect and promote newer sources of coverage — without the gratuitous opinion, please — that will eventually step in and fill the void. Maybe an “Associated Press of International Stringers Screwed by Major News Organizations” could be organized for this purpose. More, we should pay attention to the stack of statistics showing U.S. citizens’ interest deficit when it comes to international coverage, and probe deeper into why that’s the case. (Cultural narcissism? Bad, pendantic writing? Short attention span? Nintendo Wii?) If you’re skeptical of what I’m saying, check out Poynter.org, a valuable resource for all things journalism.

As an employed scribe myself (there’s my full disclosure), one thing I’ve observed is “the answers” are never black and white, ever. I hope to see more stories like Ms. Darabi’s take on a life of their own, and I hope I’ll be one of those people contributing to that organic, necessary process.

Posted 21 May 2009 at 3:03 pm ¶
politicallyincorrect wrote:

Wasn’t Maureen Dowd caught recently for plagarizing a blogger?
She has some nerve. I don’t even watch mainstream news anymore.

Posted 21 May 2009 at 3:58 pm ¶
Titanis walleri wrote:

D.C. Lurker said what I was going to say, but better…

Posted 21 May 2009 at 7:23 pm ¶
Cynic wrote:

“Human rights groups had been protesting and trying to save her from execution for months, since it is a violation of international law to execute anyone for a crime that occurred when they were a minor.”

Don’t expect the US media to say anything, then; the US has been executing people for murders comitted when they were minors itself for decades.

Posted 21 May 2009 at 7:52 pm ¶
Jess wrote:

Let me second D.C. Lurker, and offer another way of looking at it: should any Iranian media be interested in how many people Texas executes, and apply international pressure for them to stop?

Newspaper editors aren’t idiots, (well, most of them) and when I pitch a story I have to tell him why anyone who reads the paper should be interested.

“But,” you say “This was important!”

Well, important to you maybe. Important to me (had I heard of it). But what’s important to you may not reflect a rather large chunk of the population. I mean, I don’t like a lot of reality shows, but someone does. They do get ratings, after all, and the argument that there are no other choices falls a bit flat given how many channels are on my TV.

This is not to demean the value of anyone’s life. But let’s face it, most people do not live and breathe activism of any kind at all. They just don’t. How many people do you know that do?

Combine this with the very real cost pressures on the industry (and the stupid missteps made in the era of easy credit known as leveraged buyouts) and it’s no surprise certain kinds of news don’t survive well.

I am also an “employed scribe” and I have watched the changes happen in the industry, and I have to say new technology doesn’t always make things better. There are a lot of shortcomings to twittering and blogging. For instance: very few bloggers do the elementary “foot work” that journalists do as a matter of course. The emergence of the Web and all the stuff on it has made us all (myself included) a bit lazier in some ways.

When I did my first cop stories, I had to go to someone’s house and talk to a real person. I had to go look stuff up. I had to make sure I had a phone number and address and got all the info because nobody had a cell phone where I could just get them anytime. I had to learn to use government records (many of which are still not online) and actually ask people stuff. So often, a blogger will go on about a story in the news, but never actually go back to the sources the reporter used.

That makes a huge difference, and if you don’t understand why, then I’d say you’re too young to remember.

Posted 21 May 2009 at 10:01 pm ¶
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist! wrote:

This is very spot on– I only heard about her execution via a Myspace bulletin and I thought it was strange how mainstream news ignored this.

this is why we should cherish the Internet and free media– they inform us about events that NYT and CNN will never tell us.

Posted 21 May 2009 at 11:07 pm ¶
Sobia wrote:

I’ve been torn on this issue. And much of what I say may not sound too coherent. So I hope I make sense.

I do think it should have been reported all over the world, just as all human rights abuses should. But then that would mean we’d be reading about human rights abuses all day long. Because they happen A LOT. Perhaps making Human Rights Watch more notable and more mainstream would get the word out faster.

But I have to admit that a small part of me is surprised US media didn’t pick it up as they seem to report any story that could be used to demonize Iran. Some of the commentary I did hear regarding this story included things like “And they wonder why we people don’t like their culture” (in reference to Iranians). But I guess considering with Obama in office, since there does not seem to be any threat of war with Iran anymore, maybe the media doesn’t need to demonize Iran as much now. No need to enemy-ize them at the moment.

However, on the other hand, it does, as you said in your post, scream of ethnocentrism. The media will only report it if it is of interest to their target audience. For instance, in Canada we are constantly hearing of the plight/courage of Afghani women, but ONLY because Canada is in there as an occupier – certainly NOT because of some sense of Canadian compassion for people around the world. We don’t even have compassion for our own where are we going to find compassion for others?

And this brings up another issue. Western media only seems to report on human rights abuses when its related to them, and when one of their own is a victim of it at the hands of some big, bad Southern/Eastern country. When they themselves commit human rights abuses (ie Guantanamo – where they have imprisoned and tortured child soldiers) there isn’t much coverage of that either.

Its a tough one for me. But I’m not absolving US media at all. I think US media fails MISERABLY when it comes to international stories and events. Seriously, very miserably.

I hate to take the attention away from this disgusting injustice, but I do wish our state of affairs were not such that the world would need the Western part of the world to be up in arms in order to stop human rights abuses in Southern/Eastern countries. Especially considering that the West’s record on human rights abuses and social injustice is pretty bad itself. But there does seem to be this belief that if we can get the West to pay attention then they will save the day.

Posted 22 May 2009 at 12:24 am ¶
ji wrote:

Iran: Committing more human rights violations.

America: Trying to impose their own ideals and laws on a foreign country.

Nice to know some things never change…

Posted 22 May 2009 at 3:09 am ¶
Nate wrote:

The purpose of news media is to educate the ‘masses’? hmm. Well, as one of the working class its nice to know now the new media has the sole objective of dispelling our false consicousness. And not, saying making money, getting book deals or per clik advertising fees

I think Lenin had other points about that aslo. On another note – perhaps the restraint/lack of interest over this situation has had some advantages – if nothing else, the usual islamphobia crowd didn’t pick up on this and make it a cause celebre. Which is a good thing, no?

Posted 22 May 2009 at 6:07 am ¶
Ms. R wrote:

It is the same in the UK – but not only for those abroad, but for cases happening on British soil. Makes me sick.

Though I do need to make more effort in reading alternative media sources/outlets, so thanks for the info.

Posted 22 May 2009 at 6:22 am ¶
pres wrote:

Why does this story about an Iranian woman accused of murder rise to the point of an international clamor? I am certain one could find similar stories in practically any country on the globe, eghad, even America.

What point am I missing here?

Posted 22 May 2009 at 3:45 pm ¶
The Cruel Secretary wrote:

@Jess–
That makes a huge difference, and if you don’t understand why, then I’d say you’re too young to remember.

Wow, ummm, thanks for the ageist statement. Honestly, you could have said what you needed to say w/out that last, condescending, and uncalled-for sentence.

Posted 22 May 2009 at 4:53 pm ¶
Jess wrote:

@The Cruel Secretary

Sorry if it was offensive, that wasn’t quite what I was going for.

But I do get kind’a miffed whenever I hear an under – 30 who can’t spell tell me about the Wonders of New Media. I used to supervise people as an editor, and I worked with far too many kids raised on the Internet who couldn’t be bothered to learn grammar, spelling, or even how to construct a coherent narrative. Facts? Screw ‘em, only dead-tree media cares, right? Coherent ideas? You’re just being all western-centric or too rationalist or what-ever-the-hell.

God, I heard that so darned often, and it drove me batty. And it made me a curmudgeon.

I am not accusing the OP of this, I’m just saying what I ran into too many times, and it’s something the New Media evangelists tend to gloss over.

So I get a little prickly sometimes. And I start to sound like Andy Rooney.

But I will tell you this: I never fired anyone for such sins. I made it my business to work with them. I took on the people who every other editor in the place said were not worth it, because I gave a good god damn and never, ever thought anyone was un-salvageable. Because nobody is and there’s no such thing as a stupid person who can’t “get” anything. I really believe that.

So I let a little of that frustration come out. Sorry, really, you’re right I shouldn’t let that kind of stuff get in the way.

Posted 23 May 2009 at 1:40 pm ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:

@Jess –

As a 25 year old raised on the internet, I must say I find your comment amusing.

Posted 24 May 2009 at 12:10 am ¶
Neville A. Ross wrote:

@D.C. Lurker:
More, we should pay attention to the stack of statistics showing U.S. citizens’ interest deficit when it comes to international coverage, and probe deeper into why that’s the case. (Cultural narcissism? Bad, pedantic writing? Short attention span? Nintendo Wii?)

What the frack does playing video games have to do with listening to news, or, for that matter, what does playing any game have to do with it? Pleas stop blaming video gaming for the world’s problems, or the nation’s. If there is a problem with media, let’s focus on that, and not what somebody does with their time.

@Sobia:

But I guess considering with Obama in office, since there does not seem to be any threat of war with Iran anymore, maybe the media doesn’t need to demonize Iran as much now. No need to enemy-ize them at the moment.

You hit the nail on the head, Sobia. And let me further add that if the media had focused on this story, the blogsphere would be saying that Iran was being demonized by the West again, and that this story just feeds the drums of war. So maybe it was best that the MSM didn’t cover it at all.

Posted 24 May 2009 at 2:36 pm ¶