TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100989/10098900.067

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.1 KB | 116 lines

                                                                                PRESS, Page 106

Who Cares About Foreigners?


In death and disaster, where people live counts

By William A. Henry III


    One of the first axioms American reporters learn is that a
fender bender on Main Street is bigger news than a train wreck
in Pakistan. Just as Tip O'Neill crystallized electoral wisdom
in his dictum "All politics is local," many editors seem to have
concluded that all journalism should be local too. Reportage
from distant places tends to be limited to the melodramatic and
gauged by personal relevance: either the it-could-have-been-me
human-interest factor or the larger-implications factor of how,
although the news consumer was untouched by a particular event,
similar ones in the future might have greater impact.

    U.S. press coverage of two recent plane crashes provides a
striking example of this phenomenon. Each accident had larger
implications for the general safety of air travel. After a
USAir jet plunged into New York City's East River on a takeoff
from LaGuardia Airport with a highly inexperienced crew at the
controls, both pilot and co-pilot failed to make themselves
available in timely fashion for drug and alcohol tests. When a
French UTA jet exploded in midair after taking off from the
African nation of Chad, investigators found evidence of a
terrorist bomb, allegedly linked to Middle East events.

    If the crashes were comparable as cautionary tales, they
differed sharply in severity. The LaGuardia accident resulted
in two deaths and seven hospital admissions. The Chad mishap
killed all 171 people on board. Yet in the week following the
two crashes, the Washington Post ran an identical number of
stories, five, about each. The Los Angeles Times published
almost twice as many stories about the New York City crash (ten)
as the one in Chad (six). In the New York Times, the LaGuardia
crash rated twelve stories, the Chad disaster six. The networks
reacted similarly: ABC's Nightline, for example, aired three
cut-in reports and, later, a full show about the LaGuardia
accident but nothing about the Chad crash. (TIME ran three
paragraphs on the French airliner and two on the American
plane.)

    To be fair, there were logistical reasons for the
disparity. The USAir accident took place only a taxi ride away
from the headquarters of the three networks and many other news
organizations -- indeed, a CBS News producer was in the plane
when it crashed and filed a report from the wreckage -- while
the remains of the UTA airliner were scattered over 40 sq. mi.
of remote desert. The LaGuardia crash offered both the surefire
appeal of a happy ending for most passengers and a host of
survivors available for interviews. The apparent cause of the
USAir crash was quickly identified as pilot error, while
befuddling doubts lingered about who bombed the UTA plane and
why.

    Even so, the relative handling of the stories amounts to a
blatant rejection of the poetic notion that each time the bell
of doom tolls, it tolls for all mankind. The collective news
judgment seems to be that each death diminishes the reader in
direct proportion to the shared bonds of nationality, ethnicity,
religion, type of government and the like. Pointing out this
callous calculus seems to do nothing to mitigate it. As Columbia
University professor Herbert Gans noted in his 1980 study
Deciding What's News, network journalists in the 1960s tried to
prick their bosses' consciences by assembling "a Racial
Equivalence Scale, showing the minimum number of people who had
to die in airline crashes in different countries before the
crash became newsworthy . . . One hundred Czechs were equal to
43 Frenchmen, and the Paraguayans were at the bottom." Such bias
seems widespread. Fleet Street reporters have traditionally
voiced, in a blatantly racist and jingoist phrase, the
equivalence of "1,000 Wogs, 50 Frogs and one Briton."

    The disproportion seems to be based on economic as well as
ethnic factors. Air crashes, which entail millions of dollars
in losses and mainly affect the affluent middle class,
especially outside the U.S., command far more coverage than less
glamorous causes of violent death. On the same day that the New
York Times was giving front-page play to both air accidents last
month, it carried three paragraphs at the bottom of an inside
page about rebel action in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed
twelve people and wounded 17. Also in the crash aftermath, an
alleged coup attempt in Burkina Faso that led to the execution
of the second and third highest officers of government rated two
paragraphs. Murders of Vietnamese settlers in Cambodia were
cited in part of one paragraph in a more general story. That was
in the Times, which excels in foreign coverage: in many other
newspapers the events went completely unnoted.

    Some foreign violence does get substantial U.S. media
coverage. But typically this is because American corporate or
other interests are directly involved -- as when Union Carbide's
poison gas cloud killed 2,233 people in Bhopal, India, in 1984
-- or because humanitarian groups arouse American donors and
volunteers, as happened with famines in Ethiopia and Biafra. In
general, however, the scales are so tilted that Hurricane Hugo,
which killed 51 people, got about as much coverage across the
U.S. as the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that claimed 20,000
lives.

    Is a moral issue involved here? Or is this simply a
reflection of a pragmatic attempt by editors to echo the values
and interests of their readers? And does it really make a
difference whether Americans know about disasters elsewhere? It
certainly does when it comes to amassing donations or building
a congressional coalition for emergency relief. It also matters
in a less material way because every social contract, from the
tribe to the United Nations, is based on recognizing common
human bonds. Whether the fault lies with news consumers or with
editors who pander to them, the bell ought to toll equally for
thee, and thee, and thee.