Mots Maudits #3.2: Faits divers – The Banality of Horror

Go to the homepage of most French news sites and, if you scroll down the menu, you will find a section called “Faits divers” — literally, “miscellaneous facts” or “miscellaneous events.”

In theory, this section features all the stories that can’t be neatly filed in other sections like “Politics”, “Sport”, “Environment”, “Culture” or “World,” including the most banal human-interest stories. In practice though, the “Faits divers” section is often a pot-pourri of the most sordid cases of murder and child abduction currently being processed by the justice system.

A Linguistic Oddity

I have always found this term to be something of an oddity. In England, such news items would be filed under the region they occurred in; in France, they have their own section.

But why is a murder or abduction filed as a “miscellaneous event”? And how the murder of a private individual substantively different to the murder of a politician? In his 1964 essay “Structure du fait divers,” Roland Barthes describes this paradox: “Here is a murder: if it is political, it is news; if it is not, it is a fait divers.”

The Narrative Function

Barthes goes on to describe the fait divers as a “closed structure” — a news story that contains within itself everything you need to know about it. To truly understand a political assassination, you may need to know what party the victim was a member of, their political positions, those of the alleged murderer, and so on…

The fait divers is generally devoid of this complexity: there’s a crime, an investigation, a trial. It’s emotionally satisfying — compelling even — and uncomplicated. It’s like watching a short film as opposed to a series; you can quickly appraise the story, recoil from the facts, and judge or empathise with the characters without having to do the hard work of getting to know them. 

Even when the murderer’s motive defies your expectations (“a woman stabs her lover: a crime of passion? No, they had an argument about politics”), the surprise only serves to increase the reader’s fascination, like a plot twist.

The Psychology of the Fait Divers

These types of stories may seem harmless or trivial, but the psychological phenomenon of availability bias means that the media fascination with them cause people systematically over-index the risk of violence.

Take the abduction of unattended children, for example. Based on the U.S. Justice Department’s statistics on “stereotypical kidnappings,” Philip Greenspun once calculated that there is roughly “one kidnapping every 228 million hours” (about 26,000 years) of “unattended child-hours.”

The more we are exposed to something, the more common we think it is. Faits divers makes us paranoid and spark moral panics, because we come to fear what are statistically extremely rare events, and the systematic serialisation of child abductions via the news media makes us feel like there is a serial killer lurking in every park.

The Ethical Problem

The fait divers also turns private tragedy into public spectacle. In particularly high-profile cases, the media release daily updates of the most lurid details of testimony, and the families both of victims and perpetrators are subjected to frankly distressing levels of attention at what must already be a particularly challenging time.

Crime reporting can serve a function, especially if there is an ongoing manhunt for example, but investigations need not be narrated as spectacle. As it exists, the purpose of the fait divers seem only to be to generate clicks and feed our appetite for emotion and outrage.

The French media has already committed to not publishing terrorists’ names to discourage mimetic crimes, so there is precedent for changing reporting practices when it’s in the public interest. I would argue that this is another case where media restraint is warranted.