TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/100989/10098900.067

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 6KB | 104 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.