LAST WEEK a Danish media scholar, Stig Hjarvard, announced that more than 40% of the danish population are "media junkies" in one of the largest online newspaper in Denmark, www.politiken.dk. These 40% are almost constantly updating themselves on the recent news, their social network sites, etc.
I am not questioning this statement - I am sure that Hjarvard's theory fits other western countries as well - but it made me wonder; "what news is it that we keep updating ourselves on...?". And I began to look into it.
LET'S GO BACK to 2007. Time Magazine and CNN has made a list of the 10 most reported news stories on CNN. Here's the list with some keyword to each news story:
1. The Government Crisis in Pakistan (Musharraf/Bhutto, West vs. East)
2. The Mortgage Crisis (USA, Sub-prime money troubles)
3. The Munk protests in Burma (Violence, Junta, Fascist rule)
4. Goodbye, Harry Potter (Potter mania in US/EU, movie-fuzz)
5. Petraeus under Fire (Iraq, military, US foreign policy)
6. Chinese produced toys recalled (lead infected childrens toy from China)
7. The Virginia Tech Tradegy (school killings in US)
8. Stem Cell Breakthrough (science, medecine, mankind)
9. Bond breaks home-run record (US, baseball, record, fraud with steroids)
10. IPhone Mania (Apple, technology, mobile)
THE STRIKING thing is the comprehensiveness of the top 10 news. Politics, war, science, economics and entertainment, - it's all there. What's not there is the Third World countries and the disasters they experience.
We all know that US media coverage are sometimes less than adequate (ever heard about Fox News Corp.?), so let's turn our attention to the news coverage in Europe. With nearly 50 different countries and no cross-national news coverage service BBC News seems like the most reasonable choice in a pragmatic perspective. BBC is funded by the british tax-payers and should therefore not have any commercial interest in it's news coverage. Well, we must assume that they have to provide the news people want or else they will lose their audience, which may prove to be exactly the point here.
AT THIS VERY MOMENT over 1 million people are fleing their homes in the "Democratic" Republic of Congo. They are trying to escape rebel and government soldiers killing, raping and looting the civilians in this country in their effort to win this civil war. This is BIG news.
THIS STORY should at least be able to make a headliner once, since the world community is involved with the largest UN force deployment anywhere in the world. And BBC are indeed covering this event on their front news page (www.news.bbc.co.uk). Unfortunately, there are two distinct problem with BBC's (and the rest of the european mass medias') coverage of this story.
FIRST, this conflict has just reach another peak at this moment and the war in Congo stretches back many months and the sources of this war many years. The last year thousands and thousands of women and children has been mutilated and raped by looting rebel forces only to experience the same treatment by the government forces. The killings are measured in thousands as well. This is in fact and old story if the angle on the story was the huge catastrophe that still is sweaping across the tormented country. This lead us to the second point.
SECOND, when something this big is covered after so many months you can't help asking "why now?". The answer could be, that it just simply can not be ignored any longer. The numbers are too big to not be turned into a headline; "More than 250,000 refugees in danger" and so on... Another, and more cynical, way of looking at it yields another answer. It seems like African catastrophes only make headlines when things are so bad that it actually becomes a problem for us in the sense that the international western world bodies, we have established to watch the world, like UN, UNICEF, etc, are not able to deal with the situation without further funding or mandate.
IT'S LIKE A CHARITY COLLECTOR standing outside or door asking you for some spare change in order to help the starving people i Somalia. These people was not a problem - they were not even present - in your world until this collector ended up pressing your doorbell and now you have to at least acknowledge that there is a problem somewhere in the world. We need huge, present, emotional and catastrophic disasters that can not be improved without world community help.
This maybe sounds a little harsh, but think about it. Maybe there is just too many small disasters in this world that nobody really wants to hear about Congo when the numbers only amount to thousands. But it seems somewhat hollow that Holocaust still attracts headlines, when genocides in Africa is going unheard in the western world. Was the lesson from Holocaust to not close the eyes on these things. Has the civilizations in our world not reach a point where these actions (genocide, systematic raping, psychological warfare on children, etc.) should result in the strongest reaction from the only ones that have the ability to react:
Us...
If you want to know what's going on in the poor (media covered) parts of the world these are some good news sites;
BBC World (maybe it is a bit unfair to use BBC as an example in this article, since they are one the best european providers of world news)
If you have any hints about good world news sites, please write your recommendations in a comment and they will be added to the list.
This article is solely an expression of the author's opinion.
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