White lives count
Watching the 24-hour coverage of the tragic events in Japan reminded me of the news coverage I was watching a few weeks ago about the floods in Australia when a handful of people lost their lives. Tragic as that was, around the same time there were also floods in Brazil which caused landslides and killed a few hundred people in the slums. So which story do you think was the lead on that night’s TV news? Yep, the story that involved a few white people dying and lots of white people losing their homes, rather than the story about hundreds of poor, coloured people being swept out of their homes by a wave of mud. That was stuck right at the end of the news, just before one of those annoying sell your gold adverts came on the TV.
This is something that happens in the British media a lot. Why they think we’re going to be more shocked and upset if the tragedy involves whites rather than coloured people or Asians, I just don’t know. The same thing happens if a British person is caught up in a tragedy. All of a sudden the loss of their life seems to raise the level somewhat, suddenly making the story more newsworthy than when the director thought that it was only a few foreigners killed in that plane crash/earthquake/fire.
I guess the worst example of this is the reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan. Every death of a British serviceman is reported in great detail and with great gravitas; there are even reports on the repatriation of their bodies through that weird town where the residents have made themselves some sort of unofficial mourners. But what happens when some locals are killed in an explosion or even by British and American troops? We get a few brief details about the number of dead, and then it’s onto the football scores. Since when did some lives start meaning more than others?
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