Wednesday 6 June 2012

And here’s the news

I happen to think all life is sacred. And, even though it is a word that has its origins in the religious I don’t mean sacred in a religious way. I just believe life to be the most important thing. In fact really it is the only thing!

Unfortunately as far as the gospel according to the British news media is concerned there are British lives and then there are the lives of Johnny foreigner; the former taking president over the latter. It never fails to irritate me how our media reports the loss of life in wars and other disasters. X amount of Britons dying will be conveyed in suitably sombre and sympathetic tones. Any death of those from other nationalities will be delivered almost off the cuff and in a very matter of fact way.

I’ve no doubt that the same happens in other countries.
But isn’t that wrong?

1 comment:

  1. It is wrong, Paul. It's very wrong. Sadly, it's also an international phenomenon; part of the dark shadow of nationalism.

    Yet media outfits pull this all the time, particularly the larger ones such as BBC, ABC, MSNBC, Fox News(particularly bad about it, among many other things), and Russia Today.

    This doesn't only apply to current events, either. The Holocaust, having claimed the lives of around 8 million, has always recieved far more attention than Stalin's Purges (which killed approximatly 20 million), Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (around 12 million killed total), the reign of the Khymer Rouge (estimated at 2 to 5 million Cambodians killed), the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (over 1 million killed in about 1 month), and the 60-year-old conflict in Sudan (with around 2 million lives taken thus far).

    But to the average citizenry of the world, these events are little more than vauge statistics buried in history. It makes me gradually sicker and sicker to my stomach the more thought I put to it.

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