Hurricane Sandy: why have the British media ignored Caribbean victims?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/oct/30/hurricane-sandy-newspapers

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I am glad I'm not alone in scorning the media overkill on hurricane Sandy. My colleague Michael White has rightly noted the over-the-top coverage and scores of commenters to our live blog have been underwhelmed by the attention paid to a storm simply because it struck the United States.

That last point is the most telling of all. Hundreds of people die from hurricanes in other countries every year without the western media appearing to notice.

I concede that all news is local. So the American newspapers and TV news outlets can be forgiven for concentrating so much attention on a storm that is ravaging the country's eastern seaboard.

But why do global TV outlets, such as CNN, think what happens in the US is important enough to warrant beaming to the rest of the world as its main news item?

More significant still, why have British media assumed that it should be the leading news story of the last couple of days?

In my Marxist student days, I might well have suggested that Britain was hopelessly subject to US cultural hegemony. Many years on from that, I am still inclined to that viewpoint.

Despite the long-ago fracturing of the so-called "special relationship", we (by which I mean editors, journalists, publishers) still assume that what happens in America is hugely relevant to people in Britain.

Sure, they speak the same language, but note how little attention has been paid to the fact that hurricane Sandy is having a devastating effect on Canada. Yet coverage of that country's plight has been virtually nil thus far.

Then again, virtually every British newspaper and broadcaster has correspondents in New York or Washington, or both. There are fewer US bureaux, with many fewer staff, than used to be the case, but our media still think US-based journalists are crucial news-gatherers.

This is understandable in historical terms and it must be said, despite the challenges to US global superiority, America remains a hugely powerful presence.

But is it not insensitive to realise that we pay greater attention to its problems - and its storm victims - rather than those elsewhere?

In a world shrunk smaller by digital communications, we cannot say that we do not know what happens in other countries.

Commenters to the live blog have provided many examples of our oversight. For example, <strong>GilbertTheAlien</strong> counted 65 Guardian articles on hurricane Sandy, but only eight of these referred to its effect on the Caribbean.

Yet just consider the figures: 69 deaths in total, including 52 people in Haiti, 11 in Cuba, two in the Bahamas, two in the Dominican Republic, one in Jamaica and one in Puerto Rico.

<strong>James Kelly</strong> made a similar point. Front pages tell of 16 deaths in the US while the Haitian deaths get virtually no mention.

And <strong>Monkeybiz</strong> reminded us that 19 people were killed by a typhoon in the Philippines last week, one of more than a dozen such catastrophes to hit that country this year. "Oh," he remarked sarcastically, "you didn't hear about that?"

No we didn't. We seem to accept that storms routinely hit countries outside the developed world and it's therefore of no particular news value. That may be understandable because, as I say, news is local.

But what happens to nations in the developed world is very different. Huge coverage was devoted to the earthquake that struck Christchurch in New Zealand in September 2010, for instance.

Even so, it was small beer compared to the obsession with every big storm that strikes - or threatens to strike - anywhere in the United States. That is treated in Britain much as if it's a domestic story.

One other factor is important: 24-hour TV news outlets. Storms are perfect for rolling news - they provide lots of film footage opportunities, and how wonderful it must be for editors to show a correspondent battered by high winds and soaked by rain shouting into a microphone. It has the immediacy and drama of war reporting without the guns.

Our acceptance of the United States as the most important country outside Britain, more important indeed than any of our European neighbours, is an uncomfortable truth to acknowledge. It undoubtedly skews our news sense… an unconscious bias that should give us pause for thought as we contemplate those non-American victims of hurricane Sandy.