 For
crying out loud
North American news coverage of earthquake in
Iran
By Mitra Sadrameli
December 26, 2003
The Iranian
Disasters strike at odd and unexpected times. We watch in horror
as images of death and destruction fills our TV sets. We recoil
in fear of the sheer terror on the faces of the victims. And we
know that soon sorrow will follow. The kind that most of us are
lucky enough not to experience. Without malice we thank God that
this has happened to them and not to us. We thank God that our
sheer dumb luck has led us to live in a place different than today's
tragedy.
Yet the sadness that I feel today is of a general
sort. A sadness that comes with a realization that life's worth
is not
always
based on life itself, rather on whose life is at stake.
The black
out of the east coast earlier this year, with a handful of casualties
if any, received "breaking news" status.
The on slought of discussions of whose power is out, who started
the problem, the inconvenience of the whole thing received non
stop coverage. And the good Samaritans, who took off the ties,
left their briefcases and directed traffic became news.
The New
Yorkers and Torontonians taking the black out in stride became
involved in an act heroism worthy of pride. In reality though,
what else could they have done? Ironically no one mentioned that
while
for a week or so the east coast suffered the indignities of a
black out, the Iraqi's had been grappling with the same problem
for more than 4 months. There were no good Samaritan stories
reported
from Iraq.
Today's 6.5-Richter rarthquake made the bylines of
CNN. While the one cow infected with Mad Cow disease received
mention, the
20,000 dead in Iran received a byline. A perfunctory mention
at best was how the news was covered. There were no special
music, there were no catchy titles, and there were no "breaking
news". It was mentioned somewhere between Coby Bryant and
giving up smoking. The 20,000 dead, children, fathers, mothers,
elderly were not commanding our attention.
For crying out loud,
what has to happen in other parts of the world before we devote
real time discussing their plight? Why
is it that
the power outage receives non-stop attention for three days
and on the other hand 20,000 dead, more than 70% of a city demolished,
a UN designated world heritage
site's leveling flat, receives a passing mention?
What is
our yardstick for placing value on life? How do we decide whose
life to value and how much? How do we decide
what news
is worthy of covering? Have we become so callous that the
loss of
life of this many do not affect us anymore? Or is it that
just because it happened over there it is none of our concern?
CNN
headlines did not mention the news of the earthquake in its recount
of the day's top stories. Even the failed
Beagle
on Mars received repeated mention, yet the 20,000 dead
and the
grieving in Iran received a footnote at best. While news
websites had opened their day's news with the earthquake,
CNN was
more concerned whether we were worried to eat beef now
that one cow out of millions
in the
US had tested
positive for Mad Cow disease.
While I do not mean to imply
there is a vacuum of information on this earthquake,
it seems humanity is a sentiment we reflect on fondly
only for a chosen
few.
Help American
Red Cross-NIAC earthquake relief fund
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For
crying out loud