the apartheid of the media

The recent flooding in the UK, leaving hundreds of thousands of people people without drinking water, has received lots of press around the world in the past week. This has got me thinking - because the 1bn people who are without safe drinking water every day don´t get this kind of press. There are the "humanitarian crisis" articles, of course, but this much more significant crisis is not making front page news in the way that the flooding of the Thames and Severn rivers has. Most tellingly, many of the news articles about the UK flooding list by name the victims who have died. I have never seen the equivalent response in Western media to developing-country deaths due to water crises.

Why is this? I read an interview recently in which a woman who has traveled the world to learn from tribal people referred to "the apartheid of ideas" - meaning that people, businesses, and governments the West (or North, depending on how you look at the world) often think that we´ve got a lock on the best ideas on how to do things - how to run countries, build economies, do business, live as communities.

I think a similar phenomenon happens in the world news. We expect the rest of the world to care about our news, our crises, our tragedies - but we give so much more significance and attention to our own problems than to "theirs" that the term "apartheid" doesn´t seem so far off.

The more I think about this, the more pissed off I get. Why does news coming from the developing world not seem "real" to us? Why do we seem to respond with greater emotion to crises and tragedies in other developed countries, than to similar (or worse) events in places where people are poor? Is it because we are so numbed by bad news from developing countries? Or because our developed-country neighbors seem more like us and therefore elicit more empathy?

Take, for example, the steady stream of bad news coming out of Iraq. How would we react if this same news were coming from a different place, one that is on our side of the news apartheid line? As an experiment, I looked at today´s news coming out of Iraq, and changed the locations to developed-world places on "our" side of this apartheid line.

"The United Nations estimates that some four million of California´s 36 million people have fled the violence in the state, including those who left before the 2003 Canadian invasion."

"Two suicide car bombers ripped through the throngs that poured into Edinburgh streets carrying the national flag aloft in a rare moment of shared joy after the national soccer team's surprise run to the European Cup final. Police said at least 50 people were killed and 135 were injured in the blasts."

"Today Toronto police reported recovering 20 corpses, all of men shot dead and left in the streets."

My response to my own experiment: I feel really uncomfortable. And not that proud of myself, for the fact that reading this news in these contexts feels somehow different to me. I´m starting to think that for all my good intentions, I am part of this silent apartheid.

JS.

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