[Reader-list] (fwd) Where death really counts

[sanjay ghosh]

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Where death really counts 

Richard Adams
Friday August 20, 2004
The Guardian 

The satirical US magazine Spy, during its heyday at the end of the 1980s, ran a regular feature calculating the space the New York Times would devote to a tragedy. The greater the number of dead US citizens and the closer they were to Times Square, the calculation predicted, the more column inches the Times would devote to it. 

Every month or so, Spy would compare its prediction with the actual coverage, and voila! the algorithm was proved correct - so a murder on Fifth Avenue was worth hundreds of African famine victims. British newspapers have never been quite so parochial but clever mathematicians might bend their minds to creating similar arithmetic for British media. 

Designing such a calculation is going to be harder. Based on the relative coverage of the flooding in Bangladesh last month and the hurricane in Florida earlier this month, it's not just proximity or the presence of Britons that makes the difference. There's something else going on, something that's harder to put into figures. Xenophobia is one thing, but how does an equation account for skin colour? 

Obviously, things that happen within this country are going to be more extensively covered. Flash-flooding in Cornwall rightly gets rolling news coverage. After all, Prince Charles even visited Boscastle - although since he owns much of Cornwall perhaps his interest was more pragmatic. Yet it's hard not to suspect that if the Strand was washed into the Thames, then British athletes could win gold, silver and bronze medals in every Olympic event and be lucky to make page 78. 

But how can we explain the huge discrepancy between the space and effort devoted to Hurricane Charley in Florida, and the flooding in Bangladesh? Obviously, one place is a long-haul flight away, is regularly prone to natural disasters and political unrest, and many of the residents belong to a foreign culture and don't speak English - yes, that's Florida. 

Bangladesh, on the other hand, was a British colony up until 1947, is still a member of the Commonwealth and has a tremendous number of its citizens living here, as well as many other cultural and financial links. Yet all that counts for little when weighed against the key issue: Bangladesh is not home to Disneyworld. 

It may have an ancient culture dating back thousands of years and it may have the world's most glorious beach at Cox's Bazar, but it doesn't have Disneyworld. So when people see "breaking news" with warnings of titanic floods in Bangladesh, followed by live footage of the looming disaster, they don't think: "Oh no, I wonder if this will affect the beautiful 18th century Kantaji Temple in Dinajpur." But when they see storm warnings about Florida, they worry about a theme park built on a swamp by a rightwing weirdo. 

Of course there were no "breaking news" flashes or breathless live coverage of the impending disaster in Bangladesh. In fact the number of British correspondents there is very small indeed - approaching zero - whereas one can barely spit in the US without hitting a British journalist. 

Given that the US is the world's economic and military superpower, it's no surprise that that it gets more coverage. But Bangladesh is a country of 140 million, mainly Muslims, making it rather important. It is also the world's No 1 contributor to UN peacekeeping missions, and has a vital role to play in world affairs, given that it sits right by India and China, the likely powerhouses of the future. 

It's no good saying that Bangladesh is always getting hit by floods, since Florida is always getting hit by hurricanes. Just on raw statistics alone, Florida should barely get a mention. The floods in India, Nepal and Bangladesh caused a death toll of nearly 2,000. Nearly half of those occurred in Bangladesh, where more than 30 million people have been affected by homelessness and disease. 

In Florida the death toll was 16 - yet by Monday Britain's newspapers had carried 19,000 words in six days of coverage. In a month since the flooding in Bangladesh began, only 9,000 words were carried. The easy conclusion is that people in Florida are white and speak English (except that lots of them are Latin and speak Spanish) while Bangladeshis are neither white nor English-speaking. 

But it's worse than that. The only time Bangladesh even gets a mention on the news here is when there's a deadly flood. The media are caught in a cleft stick, that the only way developing countries get coverage is in a manner that does serious harm to our perception of them. The more that is written about floods and disasters, the less we take places such as Bangladesh seriously. 

richard.adams at guardian. co.uk