‘Where’ is a big W in news
Hurricane coverage forces self-reflection
At a news meeting earlier this week, a colleague wondered if “maybe hurricane Irma will hit somewhere we care about.”
It was a cutting jab at the media, which has, to some, seemed to focus on potential devastation in Florida while actual destruction rained down on Caribbean nations.
The same thing occurred last week in Houston, when flooding there dominated the news cycle while 100,000 were displaced in Nigeria, for example. Or floods wreaked havoc across Sudan. Or monsoon rains displaced millions and caused the deaths of more than a thousand in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
It’s safe to say The Spectator ’s coverage of flooding in Houston, like most other outlets in North America, dwarfed anything we printed about similar events in Asia or Africa.
It’s too early to say whether Florida will get more coverage than St. Martin or Barbuda, but I watched a Canadian newscast earlier this week that talked extensively about preparations for the storm in Florida but didn’t mention anything about the turmoil in the Caribbean.
There are many reasons for this, and it is not simply journalists making the decisions.
It is possible, for example, that there was simply not enough functioning media — or even power — in devastated Caribbean nations to transmit the news.
Meanwhile, readers and viewers relate more to what we understand. Florida is closer to home not just geographically, but culturally, politically, environmentally ...
Journalists try to give news consumers what they need, but also what they want.
Consider this: a traffic mishap on your street may be more interesting to you than a collision causing injury downtown. A collision causing injury downtown may be more interesting to you than a collision causing death in another city. A collision causing death in another city is more interesting to you than a pileup causing two deaths in another province ...
Not only can we not relate as well to events in far-off places, we often feel we cannot affect them in any way. We cannot as easily help those hit by disaster in St. Martin as we might be able to in Louisiana — or Hamilton.
We cannot do much to stop terrorism in Nigeria, but we can lobby our own government to do something about it here.
How do we eliminate poverty in Sudan without first eliminating it at home?
Garbage appears to be an insurmountable scourge in oceans and rivers around the world, but we can do something about it today along our neighbourhood riverbanks, or through our own shopping habits.
There have always been five Ws in news, and “where” is bigger than most people understand.
Meanwhile, there are always exceptions.
In far-off and relatively obscure Myanmar, a human rights crisis imperiling the Rohingya minority is getting more coverage than other endless human rights tragedies this week because it is a) particularly horrific; b) spreading; c) an issue many of us haven’t heard of; and d) it may lead to a larger crisis that will have ripples far beyond its borders.