Tsunami chaos

Meejit takes a look at the media coverage on the Asian Tsunami.

The catastrophe around the Indian Ocean is so awful in its consequences, so awe-inspiring in its scope and scale, that it might seem both trivial and mean-spirited to knock the last fortnight's media coverage – which is surely well-intentioned, at least.

So if you are inclined to share the sentiment of the Evening Herald colour banner, "DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT... JUST GIVE NOW", this might be a good time to avert your eyes. But if you've already found yourself thinking about, say, the presumptions of the efficacy of personal charity and of the various NGOs scooping up the cash; the preponderance of white faces in images of an essentially brown-skinned tragedy; the persistence of national chauvinism and sloppily applied national labels in addressing this most borderless of disasters; the sheer reductive pointlessness of repeatedly leading with body counts that are bound to be wrong; and myriad other media sins, then you have Meejit's every sympathy.

A big story like this, unburdened with obvious elite agendas, reveals commonplace media limits and errors.

In contrast to 9/11 – which also started with a body-count guesstimate in the tens of thousands, but saw the number fall dramatic-ally rather than rise – the tsunami doesn't yield readily to political-military follow-ups. In contrast to the Iranian earthquake, which filled the same dead-end-of-year media days in 2003-'04, it doesn't hit a brick wall of cultural remoteness – because of the holiday spots affected.

Sometimes, as always, things are got wrong, like the early Irish Times headline that appeared to offer assurance that Irish people were all safe and well. Then there are the familiar bigoted habits of those British and Irish tabloids enjoying a charity Olympics, a chance to wave the flag and stick a cash tally on it.

Despite Sunday Independent laments about environmentalists hijacking this story, we've heard little sense of history – e.g. of the campaigners who long warned that nuclear-weapons testing and mineral exploration in the south Pacific carried tectonic risks. (No, of course they're not necessarily responsible for this quake.)

Over and over we've seen and heard offensive ignorance about the "majority world". A radio reporter said Indonesia was "Australia's backyard" – a funny term for a far more populous neighbour. Few sources outside Village have bothered to suggest how we compound the injury to Tamil and Acehnese people when we casually count them as "Sri Lankans" and "Indonesians".

As for precedent, who has bothered to remind us that in the past 40 years the Indonesian military has twice carried out massacres that dwarf this disaster?

The US, of course, killed millions of southeast Asians more gradually. Meejit couldn't help reflect, as the speculative tsunami death toll climbed inexorably past 100,000, on how the media treated a similar figure when it came from Iraq.

The Lancet study in October put the first-year Iraqi death toll as a result of the US invasion at about 100,000, and the figure has stood up well to statistical scrutiny.

But the press have been shy about using it – even those pundits (including two Village locals, Vincent Browne and Fergal Keane) who had previously cited what they regarded as a "low" Iraqi body count as reason to reconsider opposition views about the war.

The tsunami deaths are a horror and – given those hours when many of them were preventable – a scandal that should generate more outrage. But the comparable Iraqi slaughter, far more predictable and preventable, is more outrageous still.