So, I assume everyone here has heard of the tragic events at the Boston marathon. Of course, it was terrible, and justice needs to be observed. But on the same day, 39 people died in Baghdad because of a terrorist attack. In Australia, this was sidelined, pushed to the "in other news section", and on ABC (the national television service), the report took 30 seconds, wasn't spoken about again, didn't contain any details about the situation. The Boston bombings, however, have taken hours of television time, covered every front page, and it is mentioned every day, as well as "faces of the bombing" programmes, where they go into detail about the personal lives of the dead and injured. Other disasters that occur in the US, the UK, France, Germany etc. are given hours of media attention, but disasters occurring in the less developed world are given only a few seconds, despite the severity of the latter usually being far worse. Am I the only one who feels that we're conditioned only to care about the rich world, and not the poor world, news of which we hardly ever receive? The civil war in Mali, for example, didn't get more than half a minute of broadcast a week until France got involved. People in Australia hear about every little disaster in the first world; you have to dig into information to hear about conditions in the Rwanda or Pakistan, let alone Rwanda or Syria (they don't even bother calling Syria's civil war tragic on the news anymore; they just dryly read out numbers of dead about once a week) :tantrum: So, rant completed. Anyone else really hate this?
Al Jazeera English - Live US, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Sports, Weather & Business News Problem solved.
I think the constant flow of information is suffocating! Do we all really need to know all this info?! I dont even have a tv and I still find the flow of media overwhelming!
Oh yes, this REALLY pisses me off. As if lives lost on another part of the planet are less worthy of being reported.
I once spent an evening watching three hours of coverage of an icy plane trying to land in a storm. On three different networks. Turned on the BBC and discovered that there was a subway workers' strike going on in NYC. That was the day I lost my faith in American journalism.
My biggest problem is that two American/British/Australian deaths will cause a massive stir, but 20,000 Syrian deaths is considered "normal". It's the same as when a westerner dies of a natural disaster, with a massive show of condolences, but when millions in Africa are starving, people say something like "it's Africa, get over it".
