Disastrous Disaster Coverage

Back again so soon!

This week I'm going to focus on the Chouliakari article, as I found it pretty fascinating. Ordinary news vs. extraordinary news, citizen-generated imagery, humanization (or lack thereof)...all great twenty-first century media buzzwords. But beneath that, there's an excellent point in the article that, while not being revolutionary, clearly delineates why we care about some events and not others.

I remember the 2004 tsunami vividly, and all of the video footage, first-hand accounts, and photos of the carnage afterwards. I was a senior in high school then, and when I returned from Christmas break there was a school-wide fundraising effort for tsunami relief. Yet the cyclone that hit Myanmar recently, a disaster that Chouliakari mentions as being "ordinary" news (vs. the tsunami as "extraordinary") rated very little news coverage in the United States, and on my socially-conscious (well, in some ways) college campus, there were no clothing drives or fundraisers to assist those victims. Partially that may have had to do with the junta that rules Myanmar, but the lack of attention to the disaster in general reflects up on mass media's priorities. Since citizen journalism is becoming increasingly popular, particularly for large global media outlets, the lack of inside information from Myanmar because of its authoritarian government may have also played a role in the lack of coverage.

I guess I don't have too much to say analytically on this subject since it's one of those things that everybody knows about, but doesn't get changed. The media is aware of the lack of coverage of global events that don't have mass appeal to the western populace, but it would be less profitable to expend money and resources on reporting events that won't bring in an equal return. Citizen journalism is a means to remedy part of this problem, but in states that are more authoritarian/on the less-developed side of the digital divide, the means for reporting may not exist. However, journalists have a responsibility to report on events that may not be dubbed "extraordinary, as not just western or "extroradinary" events in which developing states have vested interests. With the increasing corporate nature of mass media, I'm not sure if this will ever actually happen. One can hope though.