Brussels, in its miserable way, was part of an emerging media routine. Get your TV news anchors there on the shattered streets. Sweep other stories aside for the duration. (I particularly like the C4 reporter who told Matt Frei, just a few kilometres away, that nothing much was happening in Molenbeek except for rather a lot of policemen and journalists walking up and down.)
Naturally, in this atrocity round, there were EU referendum links, and naturally all the usual suspects made them – which meant that the “equivalence” argument from the Paris attacks had to come into question. What was the point of pretending that dozens dead in a French or Belgian capital wasn’t more a story than a similar onslaught in Beirut? Emotion and experience decide that issue.
Except that news is much more than emotion. News needs the entire picture. Turkey has seen three bombings in a few months: 36, 27 and 106 dead. Turkey stands at the other end of Europe’s migrant chain. President Erdoğan and his government don’t evoke much warmth in newsrooms because they’re idiotically keen on locking up journalists and manipulating the news. But the Turks are more than media bullies here. They are also Nato allies under intolerable stress. They are a direct part of the Brussels and Paris story. And that is a story – as Erdoğan wouldn’t say – that needs telling whole: not merely moral equivalence, but necessary understanding.
