Analysis of yesterday’s news coverage of the Mexican massacre

Mexican Tweets

More than fifty people were murdered yesterday in what is now the most violent episode in the ongoing Mexican Drug War. Most of the victims were women, some were pregnant. After learning about the horrific massacre in Monterrey, I spent several hours reading the reports coming from México via social and mainstream media. I exchanged messages with friends and family who live there (I went to college in Monterrey and my parents live no too far from there). The Twitter trending topics in México showed anger, desperation and hopelessness. One of the hashtags people often use to report violence in the city, #mtyfollow, was full of messages of repudiation and of people trying to help others find their loved ones. Some of the most retweeted messages were those with the names of the possible victims, as you can see in this chart.

American Silence

The massacre happened only 140 miles south of Texas in one of the largest metropolitan areas in North America. Yet, as Nancy Baym put it, the American twittersphere was mum. Why? In part, I think, because most of the news websites in the US were ignoring the event.

One could understand the lack of coverage in the first few hours. The news coming out of México were talking about “only” four deaths, so it is possible the events might not have caught the attention of the American news websites at first. However, ten hours after the attack the official number was already above fifty victims, with some reports as high as 61, yet sites like CNN.com gave little attention to the story. The link to the article of the massacre was buried among articles such as one about actress Rose McGowan’s childhood.

I know CNN is not known for its high-quality news coverage so I decided to check out one of America’s most trusted news outlets: the New York Times. I was disappointed, again. I had to scroll all the way down to the “More News” section to find a 10 pixel-font link to the article titled “Arson Kills 40 in a Casino in Mexico.”

Pixels per Victim

Frustrated by this, I decided to get a more objective assessment of the coverage by counting the number of pixels different news websites were assigning to the story of the massacre. I know web designers put a lot of work into every single pixel on the screen, especially of high-traffic websites. Visitor’s attention is scarce and every pixel counts. So I took screenshots of the front pages of some of the major news websites and calculated the amount of screen real state assigned to the story of the massacre. For example, the the New York Times, gave the story 291×11 pixels, a mere 0.27% of the screen real state (in a window size of 1439 x812 pixels). CNN gave it even less at 191×10 pixels, representing 0.16% of the screen. But what about other websites? Did any other websites in the English-world gave it more space? Yes. Read on.

I decided to look into non-American websites. If my calculations are correct, it turns out that Al-Jazeera and The Guardian alone gave more pixels to the story than CNN, the Washington Post, FOX News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, MSNBC and the Houston Chronicle combined. Americans might be better off getting news about their southern neighbor from a British or a Qatari website than from many of the US ones. The two exceptions were the LA Times and the Huffington Post. They both gave more pixels to the story than any other news source I analyzed. CNN was at the bottom of the list though. Click here for a slideshow of the websites I analyzed.

To summarize my results, I generated a ranking of the number of pixels per victim each news website devoted to the massacre. Yes, this issue is much more nuanced than pixels per victim, and I am not a journalism expert but I hope it can help start a discussion (or continue an existing one). If my calculations are correct, CNN devoted 38 pixels per victim, 76 times less than the LA Times which gave 2,920 pixels per victim.

Closing Thoughts

The Mexican Drug War is a complex geopolitical conflict closely linked to the United States’ financial stability and national security. If American news websites do not give enough attention to the massacre of 50 people, what can we expect of less dramatic stories with perhaps more structural and long-term implications? I list here some of the recent related stories that I wish had gotten much more attention and that I hope you get to read to understand the complexity of the problem:

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