Why is some news more newsworthy than others? What brought this to mind was the Christchurch earthquake which, while obviously tragic, seems to me to be attracting more headlines than other, bigger natural disasters. Why should this be?
The answer is, I'm afraid, obvious. Christchurch doesn't look like some odd foreign place with an unpronounceable name, and the people who live there look like us. They don't live in poverty and their skin, by and large, is the right colour, so the news channels think we'll have a greater degree of empathy with them.
Before you shout me down, reflect on the Haitian earthquake of 2010. It too got sizeable coverage - for a while, before the West lost interest. The estimate is that somewhere between 92,000 and 220,000 people died, and almost 2M were made homeless - the Christchurch death toll is likely to be less than 200. Remember the Chilean earthquake of 2010? Possibly not, because 'only' 500 or so died, and they were, well, Chileans. Now how many Chilean miners was it that got saved? Didn't that get much more coverage than the earthquake?
It's an unpalatable conclusion to have to draw, but it does seem to me as though race and affluence play a major part in the way news stories get covered.
Oh, and by the way, it is estimated that 15M children per year die of starvation. That's 75,000 Christchurch earthquakes per year, or 204 every day? Still think the coverage from New Zealand isn't a tad out of line?
No comments:
Post a Comment