One American life = seven Indian lives
There seems to be some kind of anomaly in how the australian media reports world events.
After the WTC Towers got knocked over, every Australian free to air network aired non stop coverage of the event. The eventual death toll was around 3000 people if memory serves correctly. Yesterday a tsunami, caused by an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, rolled along the coast of India, Sri Lanka, Phuket, Aceh and other neighboring areas in south Asia. Death toll will probably end up around or over 100000 - at the moment they are trying to get an accurate total because there is too much devastation. Australian media response? Business as usual, although Channel Seven ran a CNN feed during daytime today, and SBS did similar last night.
How do you judge the importance of a disaster? If it has to do with the quality of the video footage the 9/11 is clearly more important. However, if it has to do with lives lost and $ damage, then I would say this deserves more of our attention. Yet our media coverage pales compared to that given to 9/11.
Notwithstanding the geo-political significance of 9/11, and that it was a man-made disaster as opposed to a natural one, the fact is that even though the damage caused here is far greater than that of 9/11, the significance of this event to the Australian media (and people?) is far less.
This points to one thing:
Australians care more about people that look like us.
After the WTC Towers got knocked over, every Australian free to air network aired non stop coverage of the event. The eventual death toll was around 3000 people if memory serves correctly. Yesterday a tsunami, caused by an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, rolled along the coast of India, Sri Lanka, Phuket, Aceh and other neighboring areas in south Asia. Death toll will probably end up around or over 100000 - at the moment they are trying to get an accurate total because there is too much devastation. Australian media response? Business as usual, although Channel Seven ran a CNN feed during daytime today, and SBS did similar last night.
How do you judge the importance of a disaster? If it has to do with the quality of the video footage the 9/11 is clearly more important. However, if it has to do with lives lost and $ damage, then I would say this deserves more of our attention. Yet our media coverage pales compared to that given to 9/11.
Notwithstanding the geo-political significance of 9/11, and that it was a man-made disaster as opposed to a natural one, the fact is that even though the damage caused here is far greater than that of 9/11, the significance of this event to the Australian media (and people?) is far less.
This points to one thing:
Australians care more about people that look like us.
posted by Frank at 8:08 PM
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