Coverage vs Attention
Recently there have been a number of a tragic incidents that have occurred around the world. Two that have received quite a bit of attention have been the attacks in Paris and Beirut – but not for the same reasons. In the hours after the attacks in Paris, there was a huge outpouring of grief from all over the world. Perhaps most visible were the Facebook filters that colored profile pictures in the design of France’s flag. But by the next day, the emotions expressed seemed to have taken a turn in direction. Social media users expressed disappointment that though the attacks had occurred within less than 24 hours of each other, Paris had received an exponentially greater amount of sympathy and attention. Much of the blame was directed toward the media, and many accused the media of not covering the Beirut attacks because it was not a Western nation.
The disappointment is understandable. However, was it entirely the media’s fault for the perceived lack of interest in Beirut? The attention given to news can be viewed in a similar way to how popularity works. The spread of a page is dependent on its current popularity, resulting in the Power Law. Suman Deb Roy investigated the number of top 500 news domains that covered the two incidents. It was found that in the first 30 hours, Paris had been covered by 4507 outlets; Beirut on the other hand was covered by 443. However, the discrepancy was most noticeable in the first hour after the attacks on Paris. Did the spike in attention on Paris in the first hour lead to Paris receiving greater overall attention? A graph showing coverage saturation suggested that this was likely. Within the first two hours, there was a sharp increase in coverage saturation that was not observed in the coverage for Beirut. This data suggested that there was indeed disproportionate coverage in the media between Paris and Beirut.
However, the spread of information also depends heavily on the audience. The attention score of a link was calculated depending on the number of times an article was shared and re-tweeted and the authority of the person sharing it. Calculations showed that within the first hour of each attack, the attention given to Beirut was a mere 5% of the attention that Paris received, an even larger discrepancy than the gap in media coverage. Deb Roy went on to use statistical tests to determine if coverage caused attention or vice versa. His tests showed that it was likelier for attention to cause coverage, suggesting that a large part of the “blame” for lack of interest in Beirut may lie not with the media but rather with the audience.
https://medium.com/i-data/paris-and-beirut-data-suggests-how-social-media-shapes-the-coverage-738e9d336c9f#.255hogcs9