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A brilliant Op-Ed piece...

This is a brilliant piece about how the mainstream media is largely ignoring what is unfolding in south/central Asia. We ignore these events at our own peril.

thetruthisoutthere10x
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The dogs that aren't barking in the night

This past week, for me, has been an immersion course in Indian journalism. In general I've been impressed. The country's English-language media have offered lively, informative, and usually opinionated stories on the spread of H5N1 across West Bengal.

Indian reportage has also taught me that other hot-zone countries could have produced journalism of similar quality, and haven't. I wouldn't expect Xinhuanet to publish gleeful flayings of the Chinese Communist Party's failures about H5N1, but why haven't Indonesia's media given us detailed accounts of cullings and local resistance? And what's wrong with Thailand's media? For that matter, why haven't foreign media sent reporters into hot-zone villages to interview people and see what a cull is like?

I've just spent some time on the websites of the New York Times and the Washington Post, trying to find something about West Bengal. Nothing. Nothing on the UK's Guardian Unlimited or Independent either.

Think about that. An Indian state with a population of 80 million, in a country with over a billion people, is battling a poultry disease.

At the very least that disease will help to impoverish and malnourish millions, and create serious political instability. At worst, if H5N1 starts to infect humans in India, a sixth of the world's population will become more than merely unstable. A major crisis will erupt, in a region where two countries (four if you count China and Russia, five if you count Israel) have nuclear weapons.

And the major English-language media in the West can't even be bothered to pick up a paragraph or two from Associated Press or AFP or Reuters.

Granted, western media have never paid much attention to the problems of non-white countries unless those problems involved a bus or train falling into a gorge and passengers dying in large numbers. That kind of story reassures us that those poor brown people really can't look after themselves, can they?

After five or six centuries of prosperity built on imperialism and racism, the West isn't going to suddenly change its attitude toward its ex-colonies. And we're not the only ones—when I taught in China in the 1980s, my perceptive wife noticed that in Chinese TV news, bad things happened overseas. All the Chinese stories were good news.

Even so, you would think that Britain and the United States and Canada would pay some kind of attention to events in a large, important, and economically rising country like India. Our parochial fascination with trivia—the death of an Australian actor, the state of mind of a zoo's polar bear, the size of a prehistoric South American rodent—is not just stupid. It's unsanitary.

http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/