Due to the high volume of misreports and sharing on social media that the Garissa attack occurred last week, rather than this past April, IRIN News created a timeline comparing the normalized volume of all mentions of Kenya against all mentions of France from February 19, 2015 through 2:30PM EST November 14, 2015.
To put this into broader perspective, the timeline below shows all news coverage mentioning France, Lebanon, Kenya, and Iraq over the same time period, allowing you to see the relative attention given to the following attacks: November 13th France (129 killed / 352 wounded at time of writing), November 13th Iraq (22 killed), April 2 Kenya (147 killed / 79 wounded), and November 12 Lebanon (43 killed / 239 wounded). The Kenyan attacks, which killed 147 schoolgirls, received at its peak just less than a typical day's coverage of Iraq and less than the November 13th Iraq suicide attacks in Baghdad, while the suicide bombings in Lebanon, which killed 43 and wounded 239 received at their peak less than half the coverage of the Kenyan attacks. In turn, the Iraq attacks received at their peak just under a typical day's coverage of France.
Putting things into even starker perspective – globally, across all of the media that GDELT monitors in 65 languages from nearly every country, the Paris attacks garnered in their first 24 hours more than 9 times the media attention that the Garissa attack did in its first 48 hours, despite the Garissa attack having a higher death toll (as of this writing) and involving the targeted killing of young schoolgirls.
