Should it Take a Trending #Hashtag to Make News "Trendy"?

In the past week news outlets and social media have been overflowed with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. It is a huge international response to the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls aged 12 to 15 (according to the Nigerian Government) by the terrorist group Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. However, while the horrific mass kidnapping happened on the 15th of April, the news was incredibly underreported and neglected... until the first days of May that is, when the hashtag was created by a group of Nigerian women and quickly went viral (from 10,000 mentions a day to 100,000 or 200,000 in a couple days). 

The hashtag was thus widely embraced not only by the twitter community, but high profile celebrities, from Ellen DeGeneris to Michelle Obama. This leads me to question if the reason the story is now such a headliner is purely due to the 'sexy' marketing of this hashtag - would it have simply faded silently to the back pages of our daily newspapers until we entirely forgot about these girls? The answer disappoints and scares me all at once. It scares me because it happens all too often that heartbreaking news, like this abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls who brave kilometres and their own livelihood and safety simply to get an eduction, disappears as swiftly as it appears in our news, simply because the issue is "too far from home" to engage western audiences. It disappoints me because I find this lack of interest an insult to regions of the world (and I will focus with Africa in this instance) where it seems that genuine human suffering is of such little interest to us because it is "so remote", or because "the whole region is such a complicated, war-torn mess anyway". 

The whole situation highlights to me the incredible power that the media has in our present day. Just remember how much attention the KONY2012 campaign had gotten, simply because their Youtube video had gone viral in a matter of days (but mostly among young american and european audiences). 

How many of these (horrific) recent news stories made international headlines?

• Two witch doctors hack albino woman to death in Tanzania (BBC)
• Widespread and systematic atrocities (murder, rape, hate-crimes) carried out in South Sudan since December (BBC)
• 15 killed in a stampede in a Kinshasa stadium, DRC (BBC)
• 50,000 children in Somalia "at death's door" (BBC)
• Over 60 killed in Kenya from drinking chemically-contaminated alcohol (BBC)
• Pakistan suffering an "uncontrolled" outbreak of polio (BBC)
• Trial of 39 mass rapists in DRC ends in an "insulting" ruling with only 2 convicted (BBC)
• 3 killed and 62 wounded in twin blasts in Nairobi, Kenya (BBC)

The list could go on, but my point is that news media outlets are unfairly selective in the amount attention given to certain stories over others. Now replace any of the above countries with France, UK or the United States. The sad and uncomfortable truth is that had any of these events taken place in the West, our reaction would have been incredibly different.   

In the first two weeks of this news, we were too busy searching for an impossible to find Malaysian airliner or deciphering Putin's body language to focus on a story of schoolgirls being abducted in a country in complicated domestic turmoil. It was simply not juicy enough. Until the hashtag began trending that is, and all of a sudden the international community began to really run with it. Don't get me wrong - I in no way think it is a negative thing that this news story has gained such attention, but rather it is the way this happened that disappoints me. The contrast speaks for itself if we compare these images of model Irina Shayk posing topless with Bring Back Our Girls scribbled onto a piece of paper, and the actual grief of the mother of one of the kidnapped girls:       

What the media should do, is bring attention to heartbreaking crimes, such as this one. What it should not do, however, is glamorise news by using celebrities in a way that takes away from the actual importance of the content of a story. If it takes a Kardashian or talk-show host to get us talking about real world news, maybe we need to take a good, critical look at our own priorities and attempt to steer our media outlets in a better direction.



a few links worth reading about the story:

• on the NYTimes
• http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-27396702
• http://boingboing.net/2014/04/30/where-are-the-stolen-girls-of.html