Apathy Jack writes:
You know what is funny to me?
When the planes hit the World Trade Center, the American channels were screaming that there may be as many as thirty thousand dead.
Turns out there were, what, slightly less than three thousand?
I mean, that’s still a lot, but you know...
Then when the tsunami hit Indonesia, the same channels were saying that up to three thousand people may have lost their lives.
Actual death toll; pretty close to three hundred thousand.
Funny how these things work when it isn’t white people dying, isn’t it?
Just saying, is all...
© Brain Stab 2007
2 comments:
However during Katrina the media did sing out about the thousands of slaughtered and knife-raped black people in the SuperMegaDome, whereas the deathtoll was... nil.
I think what this shows is simply an over reliance by Westerners (primarily Oceanic and American Westerners, I might add) on traditional (i.e. 'local') reporting mechanisms where, if the threat is close we make it look big and if the threat is distant then we make it look smaller. So what's funny is that we don't go beyond our small horizon to look at what the rest of the world is saying. And by we I mean you. I was in Egypt when the tsunami struck Indonesia; the reportage there was much different to what you got (and when we went from Dhubai to England there was a focus shift in the media, as there was when I went from England to Wales (Welsh news reports on the matter have to be heard (also, live subtitling is really fun to watch))).
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