Why the Media is racist without even trying to be
For quite a few years now, I've been writing in various newpapers, websites, and local publications about the different plights of Africans. I've conveyed how a whole continent has avoided the media unless there is a cause: something to ruffle feathers; something to create a stir in the public eye. I remember writing about the Hutus and Tsutsis and machete-hewn children; Rwandan soil being saturated with the blood of tens of thousands. It stirred the American psyche about as much as a can of diet cola does to the blood. The first day I saw something in my own local paper, it was in the 16th page of the international section, and exactly 15 pages behind the status of the Dallas Cowboys lineup. "120,000 dead in African massacre". In the U.S. media, I saw our priorities.
Dozens of heartbreaking issues later, there has been a double-entendre exposed: The Tsunami, with the coldness of nature's reality, washed away the lives of at least 125,000 people. It stretched over 4,000 miles, touching everything from Thailand to Indonesia, Kenya and Somalia. The world is responding at a rate that has demonstrated the compassion so long unwitnessed from country to country. Meanwhile Africa and her countries, peoples, and cultures, are still silent in our news. Not only are Africa's Tsunami-hit countries on the east coast all but omitted from the news, but the topic of Sudan is back below the radar screen.
Sudan has been in a constant state of peril for quite a long time, and particularly so in the last 10 years. As of recently, there have been mass killings, mass starvations, hordes of rapes and mutilations, disease, famine, sickness, and an exodus of the homeless and destitute. It wasn't U.S. newsworthy until Colin Powell got into a tiff by declaring a state of genocide in Darfur. Let me put this in layman's terms: The death of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands in Sudan alone doesn't fill up enough news in 10 years to top one week of the global Tsunami tragedy. The AIDS epidemic no longer warrants headlines in small captions in the middle of the Sunday edition. The U.S. has pledged $350 million dollars on top of hundreds of our charities, American Red Cross donations, and aid worker support to the victims of the tidal waves. Iraq has received billions from us for reconstruction, training, and economic survival, but Darfur had a visit by our Secretary of State, and what did we do? We imposed sanctions on a country that receives an estimated $16 per citizen in foreign aid, which is more than what 50% of the population makes annually.
Do we impose sanctions on countries like Thailand, which didn't have a tidal wave warning system, and thus ended up killing hundreds of foreign nationals? Of course not. Do we have more compassion towards the victims of the tidal waves because of media influence and outreach? Most certainly. Are Africa's humanitarian plights taking a back seat in our publicity? Unfortunately.
Do you have a say in where your compassion lies? Undeniably, and awardingly so. Our mainstream news is being looked to increasingly for guidance on global and national issues, but the bias is unmistakable. Countries like Cote d'Ivoire, Dem. Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan - their own figurative tidal waves of tragedy have been hitting them repeatedly, but apparently the waves have washed the sounds of suffering out in our own news.
I mean not to take the tragedy away from the issues of the Tsunami, but merely to put our interpretation of tragedy into another place where the media is not king.