"Regarding the pain of others": media, bias and the coverage of international, disasters.

• Author: Moeller, Susan D.
• Position: RELIEF and RESPONSE

Over the last two years the world has had a surfeit of disasters. Everywhere one turned there were new photographs of bodies lined up so relatives could come and claim them. In October 2005, the images of covered corpses, stunned faces, keening mothers, tumbled homes and nature gone awry resulted from the South Asia earthquake. In August, the global tragedy was Hurricane Katrina, where the bodies the world saw weren't under rubble but floating in New Orleans' toxic flood. In July, the casualties were British; grainy cell phone photos carried viewers into the very moment that terror struck the London transport system. In December 2004, the sprawled bodies in awkward, disconcerting color were the child and adult victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Three months earlier, in September, the translucent corpses of children were from the school siege in Beslan. And virtually every day--should one have troubled to look for them--one could find photographs of the human and other wreckage of another suicide bombing, or three, in Iraq.

But not all of the crises of this past year or so have equally commanded the attention of the world and its cameras. Some disasters have had the bad luck to occur at a moment when a more telegenic disaster was already capturing global attention. The worst tragedy in Iraq in 2005 occurred on 31 August. At the same time that flood waters were sweeping over New Orleans, up to one million Iraqis walking to a Shi'ite shrine in Baghdad stampeded when the rumor that there was a suicide bomber in their midst swept through the crowd. Almost a thousand people died and nearly five hundred more were injured.

Then there were the mudslides in Central America. "I have never known an emergency become forgotten as quickly as Guatemala's, where 120,000 people have been made homeless, on the very day it came to the world's attention," recalled Toby Porter, emergencies director of Save the Children UK. But that was the same day that the earthquake shook Pakistan and India. "A country hit by a volcanic eruption, a hurricane and then devastating mudslides would in any normal week be considered a major emergency," mused Porter. "But this is not a normal week--or year.... " (1)

Other crisis stories have played even more poorly in the media. "Terror" remains the vital "bete noir" of President George W. Bush's administration, but even significant acts of terrorism abroad made but a blip on the American media radar--they made the news the day they occurred, but they were given little more attention than that: the November 2005 Al Qaeda attacks--what Jordanians have called their "9/11"--on three hotels in Amman that turned a wedding reception into a morgue, killing over fifty and wounding almost two hundred and fifty; the series of explosions in Bali at the beginning of October that killed twenty people and left perhaps one hundred injured; the July car-bombing of tourists sites in Egypt that killed almost ninety and wounded more than one hundred; and the Valentine's Day car-bombing that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and twenty others in Beirut. (2)

And some crises of unimaginable proportions still go unreported; the number of threatened or killed is not a solid predictor of coverage. The media have covered some of the most devastating disasters sporadically: the genocide in Darfur that has displaced 1.2 million people and killed hundreds of thousands; the famine in Niger that currently threatens 2.4 million people; the seven-year-long war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that has killed 3.8 million and in which the International Rescue Committee estimates another 31,000 die monthly. (3)

Other global disasters are in such a state of stasis that the media have effectively ignored their numbing devastation: the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa that has orphaned an estimated 12 million children and that has afflicted approximately 25 million, tuberculosis that kills 2 million a year and the easily vaccinated measles which kills almost half a million children every year. (4)

The lack of Western attention to what UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan calls "orphaned" disasters--except when highlighted by celebrity visits and pop stars organizing concerts--suggests that even major crises, by themselves, are not considered newsworthy. (5) There must be something beyond a death toll to compel coverage.

TAKING MEASURE OF THE WORLD'S CRISES

Who evaluates the world's disasters significantly influences how much attention those disasters receive. Those disasters that garner the most attention from the American media are not always the same disasters that governments, policy analysts, the NGO community or the insurance industry rank highest. Global crises are assessed by government officials often in terms of security interests at stake, while policy analysts typically look at crises in terms of their own singular priorities (the melting of Greenland's glaciers are an important focus, for example, for those concerned with global warming). The NGO sector values the lives at risk, the insurance industry considers property damage and loss, and the U.S. mainstream media, while taking into account all of these factors, also assesses a crisis' connection to Americans and its sensational, or even "gee-whiz" factor.

Various institutional analyses of the most "important" disasters and crises of 2005 bear out these rough guidelines: The American media covered the hurricanes in the United States to a far greater extent than disasters elsewhere despite great disparities in casualty figures; they focused on the war in Iraq, with an emphasis on U.S. troops in combat, continued violence and terrorism; they reported on "celebrities" of all kinds, from the death of Pope John Paul II to the controversy over Terry Schiavo's condition to the breakup of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt.

The media-tracking journal, The Tyndall Report, evaluates which stories get most pickup by ABC, CBS and NBC. While the three nightly television newscasts have seen ratings decline by 34 percent in the past decade, 44 percent since 1980 and 59 percent from their peak in 1969, they still attract nearly 30 million viewers each night, making them the three most-watched and influential news outlets in the United States. (6) Every week, the Report records which news stories make the three networks' weekday nightly newscasts. At the end of the year, publisher Andrew Tyndall calculates which stories receive the most coverage. In 2005, noted the Report, "Natural disasters dominated the year. With Hurricane Katrina in the lead, they attracted triple their average annual attention. NBC, whose new anchor Brian Williams was in New Orleans when the storm struck, made Katrina (522 min v ABC 314, CBS 317) its signature story." Four of the top ten stories centered on Iraq--U.S. combat, elections, reconstruction and suicide bombings--for a total of 1534 minutes. The continuing tsunami story was the fourth ranked story, with 250 minutes of coverage. The death of Pope John Paul II was the fifth most covered story at 246 minutes. The London transit bombings was sixth at 221 minutes, the Terry Schiavo story was eighth with 169 minutes and the Valerie Plame-CIA leak story was ninth with 166 minutes. (7)

With a different agenda, LexisNexis, the leading aggregator of public records and legal, business and news information, tracks which news sources and which news stories are most sought after by their clients. With that concern paramount, LexisNexis undertook a survey of American adults to determine the "Most Talked-About News in 2005." (8) "News consumption plays a critical role in what topics are discussed in our daily lives," noted a LexisNexis senior vice president in the survey's press release. (9) According to the November 2005 survey, the top ten stories of the year, in order, were: Hurricane Katrina, the rise in gasoline prices, the war in Iraq, the tsunami, the London terrorist bombings, the U.S. Supreme Court nominations, Terry Schiavo, Natalee Holloway's disappearance in Aruba, the Michael Jackson trial, the breakup of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, and the relationship between Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. (10)

Another capture of what crises emerged as most "important" came from Swiss Re, the world's second largest re-insurer. Swiss Re annually publishes revealing statistics on world catastrophes, including two lists of the biggest disasters, one in terms of lives lost and a second in terms of losses for insurance companies. The two lists for 2005 were almost entirely different. The list of the most expensive disasters was topped by the North American hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Dennis, which together claimed 1308 dead and missing but over $170 billion in economic losses--$65 billion of which was insured. (11) The list of the natural disasters that were the most costly in terms of casualties was topped by earthquakes in Pakistan and Indonesia and mudslides in Pakistan and Central America that together claimed 93,230 dead and missing--but had only $5 billion or so in economic losses, perhaps $500 million of which were insured losses. (12) Similarly, Swiss Re's data from 2004 showed a similar trend: the most costly disasters were the three U.S. hurricanes, Ivan, Charley and Frances, with insured losses totaling $24 billion, but with only 186 deaths in all. (13) By contrast, Swiss Re recorded the death toll from the "Tsunami in Indian Ocean" at 280,000, but the insured losses for that disaster at $5 billion, one-fifth of the insured losses from the U.S. hurricanes. (14)

THERE'S NOTHING BETTER THAN PHOTOS OF A "WHITE WESTERNER IN A BATHING SUIT"

The tsunami, which struck Asia on 26 December 2004, dominated news coverage well into the new year. But even given its magnitude, commentators and even relief agencies have been uncertain why exactly the tsunami captured the media and world's imagination to the extent that it did. "Only the...