Nicholas Kristof raises an excellent point in today’s NY Times:
Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.
Yet no humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per million corpses, or such a pathetic international response.
(…) A peer-reviewed study found that 5.4 million people had already died in this war as of April 2007, and hundreds of thousands more have died as the situation has deteriorated since then. A catastrophically planned military offensive last year, backed by the governments of Congo and Rwanda as well as the United Nations force here, made some headway against Hutu militias but also led to increased predation on civilians from all sides. (…)
via NY Times
I’d even go further than that: The situation in Haiti was dire even before the quake. What the quake did, however, make the situation both interesting (journalism rule No. 1: if it bleeds, it leads) and sound-byte compliant.
The true tragedy is that if a situation is complicated journalists have a much harder job with explaining the situation before the public tunes out. If a quake/tsunami/hurricane hits the situation becomes much simpler in terms of what the situation is like, let alone what is actually causing the situation.
Over the last two weeks I have been pretty annoyed by the way Haiti has been covered. You’d think that island just popped out of nowhere a few minutes before the quake hit. But no, people on this half of the island have been dying for a long time while the other half ( Dominican Republic) is a tourist destination for those countries who now act most shocked.
