How do you bury a news story?

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bg-map.gifAn OpEd in the Boston Globe tackles an issue which is part of the reason we put so much energy into Sepia Mutiny – Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Living / Arts / Deliver us from faraway evil

Human apathy toward mass deprivation is legendary. Aid organizations know this. For decades, the relief organization Save the Children has urged first-world donors to underwrite the well-being of a specific child somewhere in the Third World. Why? Because no one cares about saving children in the abstract. But people do care about saving Marzina, an 8-year-old from Bangladesh, who is currently seeking a sponsor. The media likewise know that gargantuan disaster stories have to be correctly packaged to capture readers’ attention. There is an old, politically incorrect saying in newsrooms: How do you change a front-page story about massive flood devastation into a 50-word news brief buried inside the paper? Just add two words: ”In India.”

Sad but True.

Back in the early 90s, a round of cyclones / floods in Bangladesh killed almost 140k folks — a comparable number to the Tsunami’s toll (for now). This situation was possibly more acute because all the carnage was concentrated in a single, dirt-poor nation with 140M people and few resort beaches. Needless to say, that story appeared & disappeared from our headlines pretty darn quickly.

Still, I don’t fault the newspaper editors of the world too much – it’s human nature for Americans to care more about Americans & Swedes about Swedes (be they on Phuket resorts or down a well in Midland, Texas). My takeaway is that it’s an important reaffirmation of the importance of micro-media outfits like Sepia Mutiny, desi blogs, and vast collaboration media like the Internet.

4 thoughts on “How do you bury a news story?”

  1. And yet Americans care about big natural disasters affecting the Japanese, which have little in common culturally with the U.S. What they do have is our respect. As India gets wealthier, the same will happen:

    … the Kobe earthquake… elicited two weeks of glossy, sympathetic, eight-page stories across American media. It was reported in a manner usually reserved for American disasters, and never accorded to similar earthquakes in India or the Soviet Union….the real change was in our perception of the Japanese. They had earned our respect as civilized, First World, developed — rich — and we were willing to share in their misfortunes.

    … people’s perception of South Asia itself determines how they treat us.… Since respect accrues primarily from economic power, it is the economic arena we must concentrate on first.

  2. What gets my goat is the Indian newspapers — for instance, the Hindu has had a bunch of personal interest stories about Australians/ Norwegian/ Swedish tragedies in Phuket and elsewhere in Thailand.. sad and I shed tears for them..

    Hey… how about some more coverage of the poor folks right here in Chennai.. or elsewhere in India

    But then this is the same newspaper that would have two foreign reporters covering an England-Australia cricket series — their reports got as much column space as all the other Indian sports events combined..

  3. According to the link, the cyclone was in 1970. While I don’t disagree that “in India” will sink a news story, maybe the fact that it was 30 years ago is why we don’t remember the news coverage.

    -D

  4. Eek – Deepa, Good Catch!

    here’s a link w/ a snippet for the 1990s death tolls –

    Bangladesh suffered its worst ever flooding in 1988, when 62 percent of the country was inundated. The previous record flood in 1987 saw 40 percent of the country under water. In May 1991, the strongest cyclone in a century left 139,000 dead and more than a million homes damaged or destroyed. The winds, up to 270 kph, were stronger than those of a 1970 cyclone which killed 100,000 people. Monsoonal floods in 1993 left millions homeless as half the country was submerged.

    Man, what horrible circumstances…