Local and national coverage of schoolgirl's 'lynching' confirm importance of accuracy and nuance
Regional paper closer to the details than national news agency
SHE was lynched.
That was how Midi Libre, the daily newspaper for the Languedoc Roussillon region of southern France, described the attack on 13-year-old Samara, a pupil at a school in Montpellier, the prefecture city of l’Hérault.
She was beaten and seriously injured by a girl and two boys, aged 14 and 15, outside the school after classes finished for the day on Tuesday April 2. The girl was also a pupil at the Arthur-Rimbaud college.
The incident was the latest incident of violence between teenagers in France’s schools, with online harassment and social media increasingly regarded as exacerbating, if not causing the attacks, according to coverage in Midi Libre two days later.
The attack was also covered in The Guardian and on other UK news outlets, using copy provided by the Paris-based Agence France Presse wire service on Thursday April 4– under the headline ‘Girl, 14, left in coma after attack by teenagers outside school in France’.
That’s not quite what happened.
The standfirst (introduction ) to Midi Libre’s full page of coverage (also on Thursday April 4), said Samara was: ‘The victim of a cerebral haemorrhage, she was taken to hospital in a serious condition and put into an artificial coma.’
The savagery of the attackers seems indisputable as AFP said they had been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. However being ‘left in a coma’ is not the same as being put into one, even allowing for translation. This attack of unprecedented violence sowed fear at the college, especially since the victim had allegedly already suffered acts of harassment.
Unintentionally misleading
While so much emphasis is currently put on AI and ‘fake’ news, no news consumer should forget that, despite their best efforts, journalists can still mislead, entirely unintentionally. We are only ever as good as our sources.
Studied carefully, the AFP report seems largely secondhand, citing national TV interviews while Midi Libre's coverage came from a by-lined reporter in Montpellier. For his analysis, ML journalist Guy Trubuil questioned local education officials about the role of social media and how much college authorities knew about alleged harassment.
The contrasting reports remind us all that multi-platform media plurality is more important than relying on single sources, however reputable.
While pupils and staff at schools around France, as elsewhere, face hard, immediate, lessons about harassment, social media and violence, the broader context of how we evaluate all the information around us should not be overlooked.
The reassurance may not be great but, according to Monsieur Trubuil, ‘Placée en coma artificiel, son état est ameiloré dans la matinée’. This translates as: ‘Being placed in an artificial coma, (Samara's) condition had improved during (Wednesday) morning.’
As elsewhere, the quality of journalism in France seems better where reporters live and work in the communities they cover, rather than being ‘parachuted in’ when circumstances demand that or – as in this example – using indirect sources that were themselves distanced from events.