The earthquake and tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia is unimaginable in its horror. Partly it’s the sheer scale of destruction. Partly it’s the tragedy of a lack of warning that could have saved thousands.
Like Matt Yglesias, I wondered about the slowness of American TV news to give the story much play. Even now, it’s one among many top stories (on CBS, for instance, the airline snafus and, locally, Sunday’s snow storm which really wasn’t that bad.) Certainly a calculation of relative worth consigns foreign deaths, especially Third World deaths to a low notch in the newsworthy hierarchy. But another, less sinister, reason is at play: this natural disaster took place away from media-saturated areas. It took a day or so for Western news outlets to get their hands on footage of the tidal wave itself. Of course, a disaster destroys cameras and the communication infrastructure necessary to send images. But, God forbid, should a tsunami strike California, would we be without images of the event itself?
Finally, without judgment, I wonder about our public policy responses. Granted, it’s early in the disaster, as I’m sure death counts will rise. But shouldn’t the US offer more than perfunctory promises of aid, we could have stepped up to the plate. We’ve become fixated on the well-being of the Iraqi people as a rhetorical football kicked back and forth in a dometic soul struggle over the direction of US foreign policy. Between that and our inward gaze, we have nothing much left of our collective attention to give the world. Perhaps I’m wrong, and it’s not my nature to get self-righteous about these things, but those airline snafus and local snow storms (as if we could complain about the weather!) are still commanding top billing on my TV.
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