An OpEd in the Boston Globe tackles an issue which is part of the reason we put so much energy into Sepia Mutiny - Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Living / Arts / Deliver us from faraway evil
Human apathy toward mass deprivation is legendary. Aid organizations know this. For decades, the relief organization Save the Children has urged first-world donors to underwrite the well-being of a specific child somewhere in the Third World. Why? Because no one cares about saving children in the abstract. But people do care about saving Marzina, an 8-year-old from Bangladesh, who is currently seeking a sponsor.The media likewise know that gargantuan disaster stories have to be correctly packaged to capture readers' attention. There is an old, politically incorrect saying in newsrooms: How do you change a front-page story about massive flood devastation into a 50-word news brief buried inside the paper? Just add two words: ''In India."
Sad but True.
Back in the early 90s, a round of cyclones / floods in Bangladesh killed almost 140k folks -- a comparable number to the Tsunami's toll (for now). This situation was possibly more acute because all the carnage was concentrated in a single, dirt-poor nation with 140M people and few resort beaches. Needless to say, that story appeared & disappeared from our headlines pretty darn quickly.
Still, I don't fault the newspaper editors of the world too much - it's human nature for Americans to care more about Americans & Swedes about Swedes (be they on Phuket resorts or down a well in Midland, Texas). My takeaway is that it's an important reaffirmation of the importance of micro-media outfits like Sepia Mutiny, desi blogs, and vast collaboration media like the Internet.
