May 7, 2008...5:33 pm
Burma cyclone coverage sorts the newspaper from the provincial chaff
Which newspaper has the better grasp of news values, the Dominion Post or the New Zealand Herald? The answer could scarcely be clearer from this morning’s print editions of the two papers.
A newspaper declares how it sees its place in the world by what it puts on its front page and particularly by the story it chooses as its front page lead.
The Herald’s big front page story today was about an interview with the unhappy, unnamed wife of an Auckland man who faked his suicide. It took up two thirds of the front page. There was a big, boring photo of a silhouette, presumably meant to represent the wife. The only other story on the front page was a regurgitated Broadcasting Standards Authority press release about many parents not knowing what time adult programming begins on television.
In graphic contrast, under the banner headline “Fields of corpses,” three quarters of the Dominion Post’s front page was coverage of the Cyclone Nargis disaster in Burma, including a breakout story about attempts to contact the 15 New Zealanders known to be there, and a list of seven contact phone numbers for organisations engaged in disaster relief, so readers could donate. There was a big, dramatic photo of a child being carried to a hospital. The bottom of page one carried a piece about government officials looking at reducing the speed limit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which, while hardly the second-most important story in the world today, was about an issue much more substantial than television.
Television news executives go by the maxim “if it bleeds, it leads.” Western print media used to have a similar rule, based on the death of one white Westerner being more important than the deaths of even tens of thousands of brown, black or South American people.
Few catastrophic news events were more notoriously not covered than the deaths of 500,000 Bangladeshis in the 1970 Bhola cyclone, which attracted barely a few paragraphs on the cables pages of many English-language newspapers despite being the biggest storm death toll ever recorded. I invite anyone reading this to say, honestly, if they have ever heard of this appalling disaster, which killed twice as many people combined as, for example, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear holocausts, which our media, rightly, never let us forget, or compare it to the media coverage, which continues to this day, of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. The fact I don’t even need to explain who President Kennedy was demonstrates the point.
Bearing the Bhola cyclone in mind, in December 2004, when the Aceh earthquake set a tsunami going that killed 300,000 people, I wondered if at least one of the reasons for the massive coverage in Western media (which ethnocentrically dubbed it “the Boxing Day tsunami” despite there being no Boxing Day in the affected countries) was because it happened over the West’s Christmas holidays, a news time so slow that almost anything at all — even a single road death — is elevated to lead story status. The fact that many Western tourists died at Thai resorts might have been a factor, too, but nonetheless I hoped that the precedent set would be remembered next time there was a disastrous event in a part of the world that rarely registers in our news media.
The Dominion Post remembered and made itself look like a true national newspaper this morning, by making the most important story in the world today its front page lead. Auckland’s Herald, which by its pretentious name thinks it is our national newspaper, showed itself to be an insular, provincial rag.
13 Comments
May 7, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Good point. I also liked the fact that you refer to the country as “Burma”.
I think there is a story that needs further publicity to raise the question why the NZ government and media continue to use the military junta’s preferred name of “Myanmar”, when most other nations and the Burmese people still call it “Burma”.
May 7, 2008 at 9:34 pm
It was like that on the Herald’s website too. At 7am this morning the lead was “Parents unaware of TV turn-off time”, while stuff had the Myanmar story.
May 7, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Nope, I have to confess I hadn’t heard of that natural disaster in Bangladesh in 1970, Poneke.
But I do know of the man-made disaster the following year:
The mass killings in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1971 vie with the annihilation of the Soviet POWs, the holocaust against the Jews, and the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated act of genocide in the twentieth century. In an attempt to crush forces seeking independence for East Pakistan, the West Pakistani military regime unleashed a systematic campaign of mass murder which aimed at killing millions of Bengalis, and likely succeeded in doing so.
http://www.gendercide.org/case_bangladesh.html
Estimates of the number killed are documented here:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP8.HTM
Closer to home, there is a paucity of good analysis in our news media of the unfolding political situation in Fiji. I groan whenever I see a reference to “ethnic differences” as if that’s all there is to it, rather than the multi-layered power struggles that many other countries have been through at various points in their history. I was pleased to find you have a link to David Robie’s Cafe Pacific website when I explored your blog in the weekend.
May 8, 2008 at 12:52 am
Aside: on Tuesday TVOne 6pm News ran the Govt.’s carbon-trading story as lead, TV3 ran the cyclone. Not that that means much.
May 8, 2008 at 7:01 am
tsk tsk tsk now poneke… what are you suggesting? that the national newspaper should inform or educate its readers?!
titillation has been the order of the days for years now.
and you can’t upset the natural order, can you.
May 8, 2008 at 10:33 am
I normally admire your posts, Poneke, but in this one you’re picking at some pretty trivial nits. Using the phrase “Boxing Day tsunami” is ethnocentric? Maybe it’s just a conveniently recognisable locution for Western readers - unless we’re expected to avoid ethnocentrism by using the Indonesian, Thai or Tamil words for “26 December tsunami”. And yes, some of the intense coverage of the tsunami was because of the lost Western tourists - but surely most of the coverage was because it was such an unprecedented disaster (ie, as a tsunami), regardless of the time of year. By comparison, the Bali bombings took place in an October, and weren’t exactly ignored; do you suggest that their saturation coverage would have been even greater if they’d happened in the Xmas-New Year silly season?
I recall at the time of the tsunami, there was some media commentary that this was the biggest natural disaster in the region since the 1970 Bangladesh cyclone. Can’t remember where, but I don’t think it was NZ media.
And on your main topic of the quality national Dom Post vs the trashy provincial Herald: is this the same Dom Post that, in a single week, ran revealing cover photos of the silicone victim Nicki Watson and a female tourist who’d been asked to leave a bar because she was showing too much cleavage?
[Poneke says: The Bali bombings attracted so much media coverage because so many of the victims were Westerners. If a bar full of Balinese had been blown up, I doubt it would have been reported outside Indonesia.]
May 8, 2008 at 11:14 am
I think Poneke is absolutely right. The Bali Bombing was important to Western media because of the fact that it was “our” people targeted at one of “our” favorite holiday destinations.
When hurricanes devastate Western countries it’s massive news coverage, when a typhoon hits around the South China Sea it’s a few lines describing how many were killed.
May 8, 2008 at 11:50 am
[Poneke says: The Bali bombings attracted so much media coverage because so many of the victims were Westerners. If a bar full of Balinese had been blown up, I doubt it would have been reported outside Indonesia.]
Fair enough, but that’s not my point (which I didn’t word well). My point was that the time of year, and the Silly Season phenomenon, may not make any difference once a story has enough weight. Sure, if there are no Kiwis involved or Westerners killed, the death toll has to have a few extra zeros for our media to sustain interest. But the 2004 tsunami definitely did have that weight, and that’s part of the reason the story was covered so well - the other part being that there was cool home-video footage of waves crashing through Thai beach resorts.
I suggest the Bangladesh cyclone was ignored and quickly forgotten not because Westerners weren’t killed, but because TV and other media (including the then-nonexistent Net) couldn’t mobilise so quickly to cover it while it was still fresh. That’s the difference between 1970 and 2004. And maybe part of the interest in the current Burma disaster is the sense that media should be in there just like in Aceh (that sense wouldn’t have been so strong back in 1970). Just a theory - perhaps what’s going in now in Darfur & the Congo doesn’t quite bear it out.
Oh, and I still say the Dom Post has some really, REALLY bad days.
May 8, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Ian, I was referring only to yesterday’s Dominion Post, which I regarded as having run the most important story in the world on its front page, while the Herald chose crime and television parochialism.
I have been utterly scathing of the DomPost’s news judgement in the months I have been writing this blog, but not this time.
Just in passing, I note the DomPost again gave major coverage to this disaster today, but the Herald again did not.
It is the biggest story in the world today, as any glance at overseas news websites or a look at BBC World etc will show.
May 8, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I won’t buy into arguments about “which paper is better” or how stupid/shallow the msm are.
But I did find the following a bit offensive.
“I wondered if at least one of the reasons for the massive coverage in Western media (which ethnocentrically dubbed it “the Boxing Day tsunami” despite there being no Boxing Day in the affected countries) was because it happened over the West’s Christmas holidays, a news time so slow”.
It was a disaster on a huge scale, my organisation recognised that and sent me there not once, but twice to write about it in Banda Aceh.
There were no New Zealanders killed there, there was no dramatic westerner’s video coverage.
My organisation is cheap, it does not spend money lightly and it was not an easy assignment.
It was a news judgment call… true I had to write about NZ army and aid workers a lot, but that is finding a hook to differentiate from the excellent international wire coverage.
The experience was one of the worst and best times of my career, to say I got sent there because it was a slow news day is a bit insulting to news organisations (who could have just taken wire copy) and the dead.
I was six years old when Bhola happened, so can’t really talk about that.
Also the death toll in Aceh is massively under reported. I saw bodies being tipped from a rubbish truck into holes and no one was counting.
There were towns wiped out that did not even figure in any death toll story and the Indonesians were always determined to play down the deaths in Aceh.
The tag of “boxing day tsunami” as you know is just a simple way of getting reader recognition about an event, it is not a slight, insult or ethnocentric. It is a recognition of the audience you write for.
The attacks in America known as September 11, happened on September 12 in NZ.
But it would be stupid to say the September 12 attacks because that was the day it happened here.
Anyway after that little rant I would like to say I like your blog.
May 9, 2008 at 12:27 pm
The name changed to Myanmar 19 years ago, get over it. I don’t see the name Rhodesia being resurrected just because no one likes the regime currently in charge there.
Should we have referred to Thailand as Siam again after the military took over there? Please.
May 9, 2008 at 12:38 pm
An alternative explanation for the lack of coverage of the Bhola cyclone disaster in Bangladesh in 1970 is that Western media were fully occupied covering the war in Vietnam war at the time. Images of that war engaged the sympathies of Westerners towards non-Westerners in tragic circumstances in a more immediate way than had ever been possible before. Screened night after night on television, those images and stories of the Vietnam war led to such widespread American opposition to the war that the US government was eventually forced to withdraw.
In particular, Seymour Hersch’s exposure of the My Lai massacre in late 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970), and army photographer Ronald Haeberle’s shocking pictures of that event (which were widely published and became the subject of a famous anti-war poster, “And Babies? And Babies”) received much media coverage in the western media in 1970, as the investigation of those involved continued.
http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/library/wf-200.htm
When this story of the deliberate slaughter of old men, women, children and babies broke at the end of 1969, I had a part-time job in a library. I vividly remember the deep shock I felt when I opened a magazine that had just arrived in the mail (it was probably Life Magazine), and was confronted by those stark photographs. I showed them to a colleague, an older woman and a very conventional Anglican. She looked at them and said “Yes, but they don’t value life the same as we do”. Two shocks in one day.
A Melbourne newspaper which published those photos was prosecuted for “obscenity” but the charges were later dropped.
http://www.asiapac.org.fj/cafepacific/resources/aspac/viet.html
May 9, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Poneke: No argument that the world’s biggest story at the moment is the Burma cyclone. I haven’t been reading your blog (which I enjoy) long enough to know that you have a record of criticising the Dom’s priorities, so perhaps there’s not that much light between us. Except that you might see the glass as still half full, whereas I’ve got to the point of feeling mildly bemused whenever the Dom actually does a reasonable job of being a newspaper.
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