The Dark Mountain Blog
Small flood in Sri Lanka; no white people dead
posted by Paul Kingsnorth
12th January, 2011
It seems like a lifetime ago now, but the spur that led directly to what was to become the Dark Mountain Project was a blog post I wrote a few years back about my final, exhausted withdrawal from life as a journalist. I was sick of the media, and I didn’t want to play the games anymore. I wanted to do something else; something purer, more real, something which focused on the things that were actually important. It was this post that led Dougald to get in touch with me, and the rest is history.
I haven’t really kept my promise, in that I’ve not abjured journalism completely. But I no longer call myself a journalist, or feel like one, and I no longer ‘consume’ very much mainstream news either. Sometimes, events happen which forcibly remind me why.
Today, I would like you to compare three news stories which are currently playing out in different parts of the world. Here’s a summary of the main points of each, with the geographical references removed.
Story one: Heavy rain has led to a major city being hit by the biggest flood in forty years. 20,000 homes are threatened with partial or total flooding. The city has been partially evacuated. Surrounding areas have already been inundated, and entire towns almost washed away. The country’s prime minister describes the destruction as ‘mind boggling.’ Death toll so far: 12.
Story two: Heavy rain is leading to mudslides and massive flooding in several towns surrounding a major city. This follows several months of flooding, which has left thousands homeless. The country’s biggest city was recently hit by chaos caused by heavy rains. The mayor of one affected town calls the situation ‘a huge catastrophe, a major disaster.’ Death toll so far: 93.
Story three: Heavy rain has caused severe flooding which has displaced nearly 200,000 people. Two weeks of rain has led to the destruction of villages, towns and farmland. The country’s president is unable to visit the scene due to the extreme conditions. Reservoirs are bursting their banks, and people are going short of food. 800 makeshift camps for homeless people have been set up, but they are now being affected by the floods as well. Death toll so far: 18.
These stories are all playing out in different continents at the same time. They all appear to have the same cause – an unusually severe La Nina year, which is driving extreme rainfall across the world. And they are all being reported in the media in the UK and around the world.
The difference in the level of coverage, however, is striking, One of these stories is receiving blanket coverage as I write. It is leading every news bulletin, it is on the front page of every paper, it is being analysed and commented upon on every news site. The others are being reported in small pieces on the ‘world news’ pages of papers and news website, where you have to look hard to find them. If you don’t look hard you might not even know they were happening. You would be forgiven for not knowing; the airwaves are so taken up with the one flood, that the others are barely getting a look in.
The story that is getting this blanket coverage is story one – the story of Australia. Story two is happening in Brazil, and story three in Sri Lanka. The first is perhaps the least catastrophic of the three. All, of course, are terrible and devastating for those involved, but so far the damage to Australia has been less than to the other two nations, and as a rich country it is best placed to mitigate it and repair it afterwards.
So what is going on here? Why is this happening? And why, time after time, is this pattern repeated in foreign news coverage? It’s tempting to say that the driver is simply a kind of unspoken, primitive racism. Australia is full of white people. People like us! They live in cities, drive cars, speak English, play cricket (sort of). Brazil, on the other hand, is full of poor brown people, and poor brown people are always dying in natural disasters. Economically speaking, their lives are actually worth less than ours (just ask Mr Obama’s economist Larry Summers.) As for Sri Lanka – where is that again? Is it near Burma? Oh right, it’s that island with the elephants on. Well, they’re always bombing each other and dying of cholera and things. Floods probably happen there all the time. It’s not the same as Brisbane, is it? Brisbane’s a bit like London, or New York. Brisbane is full of People Like Us.
Is it a subconscious, culturally ingrained racism that drives this? I think so, yes, at least partially. But like any discussion about ‘race’, there’s more under the microscope than skin pigmentation. The old assumption about the superiority of white people, after all, was never simply biological. It was very much tied up with the cultural, economic and political achievements that the white people were responsible for. The Victorian notion of the ‘white man’s burden’, remember, was a charitable one. At the time, it seemed obvious to everyone that We were better than Them. We had steam trains, surgery, dirigibles, ironclads, neckties, the Bible. They had cholera and superstition and poverty and animism. Our moral duty was to help Them Become Us.
This imperial narrative morphed, after the death of the Western empires, into the narrative of ‘development’ that we still cleave to today (I recommend this explanation of the process). Now, the world is divided up into ‘developed’ countries and ‘developing’ countries. Developed countries are largely white. Developing countries are largely brown. The latter are assumed to be on an inevitable trajectory that will lead them to converge with the former. When this happens, it will be known as ‘global justice.’ It will mean that everyone finally has access to suburban houses, laptops, antibiotics, cars, Nike shoes and representative democracy.
Those assumptions, I think, are what we are seeing played out in this reportage. When a ‘developing’ country is devastated by a natural disaster, it’s to be expected. When a ‘developed’ country is hit, it’s counter-intuitive; it automatically becomes a crisis. This is the playing out of the Myth of Progress on the world’s front pages. Progress means never having to get flooded. Progress means being insulated from nature. When Progress fails, it’s big news. When the poor die, it’s business as usual. Except that business is starting to look very unusual indeed, more and more of the time. When the media finally, eventually, wakes up to that, what does the world start to look like through its lens?
Well, we shall find out.
Posted by Paul Kingsnorth on 12 January, 11
Posted in: Blog
Comments: 30 comments - Read them and respond
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Hello
I absolutely agree with you and I wrote about the weighted media coverage on my site Landscape Juice this morning.
http://www.landscapejuice.com/2011/01/flooding-out-of-sight-out-of-mind.html
Thanks to John Walker for pointing me to your blog post.
Excellent, thanks for putting into words what was gnawing away incoherently at the back of my mind while watching the coverage.
You’d have picked up on this imbalance anyway I suspect, but what you say about not being much of a consumer of mainstream news is perhaps an important one. We never had much time for news coverage previously, but since we moved to the wilds of the Outer Hebrides we’ve had virtually none. No TV, no radio signal for 6 months until just recently, no chance of a paper locally all summer cos the tourists get to the shop and to them first … so a selection of news sites on the internet and the odd bit of Radio 4 driving to town has been all there is. So when we did get the radio signal issue solved and now that it’s winter and the newspapers that arrive finally in the afternoon are still sitting on the shop shelves the next day – the nonsense stands out like a sore thumb. There’s nothing particularly virtuous about not knowing what’s going on in the world we belong to, that’s not my point – and we do make an effort to know and care – it’s just that sometimes an enforced absence of bullshit over a six-month period can be a grand thing to reset the perspective button. I can recommend it!
Paul,
I generally share your cynicism of the media, but (in the UK at least), the coverage of the Australian floods is probably given a much higher prominence because of the sheer number of UK ex-pats and gap-year backpackers who live there. Most families know at least one friend or relative who is there.
It’s also interesting to see that the Brazil Floods are the top story on the BBC News website today.
I agree about how the weightedness of news stands out after an absense from it. Recently I returned to the UK and I was struck by the endless local weather reports and nothing about the future of the Euro and Ireland, for example.
In relation to unbalanced news coverage, I remember reading years ago about analyses of the news perhaps it was in Roland Barthes Mythologies: “Hiding its intention, bourgeois myth naturalizes and eternalizes itself,” he wrote. That is, the dominant ideologies and ideas perpetuate their own interests. Mythologies – it is a good book!
you missed out another flood:
Philippines… death toll rising above 40…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/13/floods-landslides-sweep-hundreds-deaths
at least the Guardian can see that so many floods are happening at once is a story in itself
AND ANOTHER.
South African floods leave more than 30 dead.
http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFJOE70B0LR20110112
My brother’s thoughts:
‘That’s an interesting idea, and probably more or less correct, but I think there are other factors. Certainly people expect such disasters, and more tragic consequences, of “developing” countries.
‘There’s also the fact that Australia is an English-speaking country with a large British ex-pat community and more shared culture and a shared history with the UK. The UK public therefore largely identify more closely with Australia.
‘There are practical issues as well – it’s easier to obtain and broadcast footage from Oz, compared to disaster-struck Indonesia, and there are fewer foreign correspondents to obtain such footage than there once were, too.
‘Lastly, this kind of irrational weighting goes on everywhere. Generally, the last US election got massively more coverage in countries in Africa – particularly Kenya – because Obama is black.’
Though for Indonesia he meant Sri Lanka, of course!
I think those are good points Gavin. Speaking of the British media in particular, it certainly has a – perhaps understandable – bias towards the Anglophone world. You’re also right about the ease of getting footage from ABC correspondents, say, over Globo in Brazil. And I’m sure our media has more correspondents in Australia than Sri Lanka.
So some of this is understandable, and I think this is why it’s important to look at it as a wider cultural bias rather than some kind of colour prejudice (which is not really the point.) But I also think that the deeper assumption – that this kind of thing shouldn’t happen to People Like Us and that when it does it’s big news – is the key driver here. It’s Dog Bites Man stuff.
Hey, I’m a Sri Lankan, living in Sri Lanka and I must ask, do you realise that the media is far more developed and able in Australia than here, and possibly Brazil too?
Media here and up north in India (we get their satellite channels here) are concentrating more on what’s happening here than in Queensland. Fair enough in my opinion, it’s not as if they’re completely ignoring it. I agree with what Gavin’s brother said.
Also, taking into consideration the rate at which food prices are rising around the world, I think the Queensland flooding could arguably have a far greater effect on the worlds population in the long run than the more immediate losses of life elsewhere. But that’s another topic.
Hi Chin – thanks for the points. I take your point that your media will obviously cover your floods over and above other peoples’. Same for the media in Oz. Nothing wrong with that – that’s their job. I’m really talking about why the media in a country like Britain, which is not a victim of any of this, chooses to prioritise the Oz floods over those of the other nations mentioned.
It looks like there are a number of likely reasons for this:
1. Ease of getting media into, and media reports out of, Australia, compared to rural Brazil, Sri Lanka or Philippines.
2. Cultural connections with Oz – they are Like Us (indeed, Australia is, arguably, 1950s Britain transplanted to a desert!)
3. Unconscious bias as regards ‘developed’/rich/white countries, and the shock we feel when they suffer from natural disasters.
4. Economics. Interesting that you point this out. It may well be that globally the Australia floods turn out to be important because of their economic impact. But this, it seems to me, rather feeds into the point I am making here – that some disasters are judged more important than others for reasons other than their impact on human lives. Or: some lives are worth more than others.
I was tempted by the UK media is covering Australia (over other flooding)argument because of family connections until I spent last week in Zimbabwe, tuning in of an evening to CNN and there the bias is absolute (and I am unsure as to whether most Americans are any clearer as to the geographical location of Australia over either Brazil or Sri Lanka).
It is, I think, simply the case that ‘white, developed’ deaths are more shocking to us than ‘non-white, undeveloped’ deaths because we imagine falsely that we have ‘escaped’ all that messy confrontation with a nature that refuses to behave itself (and it is true our ‘defences’ are better raised…for the time being)!
Back to what Paul initially wrote about…
At last! Someone who accurately puts his finger on one of the most important neglected truths of our time: The disproportionate coverage by media of the world! We all talk about, or at least it seems we want to believe we are talking about, that we live in a globalised world. Still none of the big newspapers or media-corporations seems to have one or two people that make the coverage of the world, newswise, proportionate.
Another thing: I live in Sweden and since childhood (I´m 45 now)at least 80% of al the movies and TV-serials has been from USA. It´s still that way. This is another of those anoying “disproportionates” that distorts the world for us.
Once you´ve started to see these “disproportionates” it´s like looking att the world with a new pair of glasses. It´s hillarious in many ways.
Think about Japan for example, one of the biggest economies in the world. Even though they are “civilized” as us in the socalled western world, the coverage mediawise of Japan is a joke! I must admitt I still don´t know if Japan has a president or what the leader of the nation is called. I know I easily could find out myself, but it says something important about media-coverage.
When the election for president in USA was going on in 2008 every swedish newsreport for almost half a year spended at least five minuites every time to talk about this. When it comes to Japan or India, or whatever country in Asia, Africa or Southamerica, they might tell it once, and if you miss it, you are in the dark.
Paul really hits the nail when he talks about covered-up rasicm. It´s so baaad these days to be a rasict. Media talks about it everywhere… and, of course, that, at least, is great. But when it comes to examining the hidden/unconsious rasicm going on, nobody seems to see or gras or fathom a thing…
Daniel
During the massive Tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean a few years back I cringed at the news reports focusing on how many foreign tourists were missing on their luxury resort islands than the populations of millions who lived in boxes. White Vs dark? Developed Vs undeveloped? More like pure ignorance disguised as digital intelligence in a virtual unreal world of denial of anything outside the comfort box.
Important observations throughout.
Just wanted to add that behind all these stories about floods is another that never gets told: many are deliberately invoked and are not ‘natural disasters’ nor are they symptoms of ‘global warming.’
This story can only be found by careful research on the internet.
The main stream media is not only bigotted, but worse, is a purveyor of deception and disinformation. This, it seems, is the price demanded by its corporate owners.
‘Racism’ can merely be read into structured situations like this, rather than being inherent or deliberate.
Whilst I don’t discount the possibility that Paul is, to a certain extent, correct, the news is addressed to a particular audience, and whilst many of us may be striving towards a broader, less parochial, subjective world-view (or even a universal, extra-temporal, Zen view), we are not the majority of British news’ audience.
We are a predominantly Caucasian country. White people more commonly have white relatives, both here and in other countries. Also, birds of a feather flock in a way that we have culturally recognised. Therefore the news is responsibly going to report relevant news such as floods from countries that we have, in our great, glorious past, stolen from brown people, and therefore retained social connections with. I don’t think that the news could be usefully neutral, as it would make itself irrelevant by addressing every ‘dog bites man’ and ‘dead donkey’ story.
When looking at news bias/focus, we need to ask what is more important: relevant news or big news? To choose one over the other isn’t necessarily a matter of racism.
Gaia will give us some *huge* news stories in the coming years that will need interpreting and that we will contextualise/explain, so perhaps opting for this white man’s guilty perspective isn’t one of the most useful, regardless of how it might appear from a colourless, raceless perspective.
Don’t know where to go with this idea… requires more thinking.
I have a racist uncle, whom I try to avoid but am sometimes forced to deal with for the sake of my grandparents. I was driving through Sylacauga, Alabama, with this uncle and he clicked his tongue and shook his head and pointed out the window to a group of white thirty-somethings sitting on a stoop.
“It’s just too bad,” he said, going on to make a few more comments about their assumed poverty.
Apparently he couldn’t be bothered to notice the black and latino men and women sitting on the stoop of every. other. building.
Jack – birds of a feather do indeed flock together, but it’s not the job of the BBC, or any other decent news organisation, to play up to this – or indeed play it down. It’s their job to report news. And a flood is a flood, whoever it happens to. There’s no ‘guilt’ involved in this thought; that’s a lazy reaction. I don’t feel guilty for being ‘white’, and I don’t cry racism at things very often. But in this case the bias is so clear as to be very striking.
@Paul – “It’s [a decent news organisation's] job to report news. And a flood is a flood, whoever it happens to”
I agree on both counts. But I’d argue that a lazier argument is seeing a correlation and reporting it as causality without examining the correlating factors. It would be a similar error to describe me as racially biased for not having more non-white friends, or misandrous for not having ‘a proper balance’ of male friends.
Why shouldn’t /this/ audience be more interested in an Australian flood? That’s why I questioned guilt as a motive. It seems wrong to admit or ask that. Brazilians are just as valid and important as Aussies, but perhaps not to a British audience. Merely on probability, the British news audience will have stronger, more salient links with Australia than Brazil. We are more likely to know someone affected in Oz than Brazil. Therefore, it is more likely to be newsworthy to this audience.
What is ‘news’? The isolated, neutral, objective report of all events?
– Comet hits Pluto.
– Political execution in China.
– Poisoned water supply where you live.
All interesting in their own context – but perhaps some would be getting in the way of the ‘real news’; the relevant news. Yet an comet strike is big news. Execution is far more ‘important’ than water quality. The idea that mere scale of event decides newsworthiness rather than to whom the news is delivered conflicts with the rationale of local news. Yes, people have lost their homes and lives in each of the floods, but which story is relevant to a British audience? Which crowds out locally relevant information, because of an objective interest in the abstract? Our stories told down the Dark Mountain will include the relevant connected dots of geographically and temporally more distant events (El Niño is the big story here) but will surely focus increasingly on the relevant dots, that connect to our less globalised, more immediately dependent lives. Is ‘objective news is the best news’ a myth in need of critical examination? Does it lack relevance to our hearts that more subjective news achieves?
There are historically caused racial and cultural correlates, both in our closeness to Australia and our comparative remoteness from events in Brazil, but that doesn’t imply that we are interested because of the number of white people affected. I’m obviously* not denying that racial bias exists, but reporting the correlation doesn’t make it true in the general way you suggest.
* At least I hope it’s obvious, talking about prejudice neutrally always runs the risk of sounding like a defence!
Jack: I’m not describing correlation as causality. I’m speculating on what the causality might be.
Any news organisation is, indeed, going to report first what seems most relevant to its audience. Obviously you would expect the British media to give more attention to a flood in Yorkshire than a flood in Panama. But it looks to me as if you are speculating here on causality as much as I am. If you were to ask, say, the BBC or the Guardian or the Telegraph why they devoted thousands of words to floods in Australia and only a few hundred to floods elsewhere, do you think they would reply ‘Australia is more relevant to British people than Brazil, so the news is more important’? I don’t know: maybe some would. But I bet the BBC wouldn’t, or the Guardian or the Indy or any other broadly liberal outlet which prides itself on its global perspective. And yet they all had the same bias.
In any case, I’m not especially convinced that Australia is particularly relevant to many British people. Yes, some emigrate there, and some have relatives there, but how many? I don’t think it would be enough to justify this gap in coverage.
Bear in mind that I was careful to qualify my discussion about ‘race’ here. I wasn’t arguing that it was simple skin colour prejudice that was the problem, but rather an assumption about progress, development and civilisation, and what these things constitute. I agree, actually, that ‘objective’ news is a fiction in itself. If this is the case, I think news organisations ought to be more honest about their biases, and open about them too. If they think Australia is more important than Brazil, they should tell us why. I haven’t heard anyone going to that place, though.
@Paul, I haven’t heard the liberal media’s admission of bias either… that /would/ be interesting to hear. The baser outlets seem to have held onto this a bit more – you more typically – and honestly – know where The Sun or The Daily Wail are coming from.
I was slightly amused by the description of the BBC as a decent news outlet as I find them of ever reduced worth. Because of getting news elsewhere, I also ignore many news broadcasts and broadsheets so haven’t experienced the level of bias and don’t know how preferential it has been. I guess that there is something in your comparison of the actual strength of Anglo-Aussie/Brazilian/SriLankan connections and the degree of bias.
Whadyaknow? Australia’s floods have just been on BBCR4 news. No other floods reported. Brazil, Sri Lanka et al must’ve dried up. Hmmm. Perhaps I was just plain wrong. The distinction you made between race and development level is something that I’d brushed over. I do actually see and hear that behaviour all the time, and not merely in the news…
e.g. “How could this happen in the 21st century?”
or more commonly in my experience:
“How could this BE ALLOWED TO happen in this day and age?”
Which highlights what I find the biggest presumption in our contemporary thinking; the expectation of imposed, top-down control over an acceptance of emergent order from complex systems. Back to the myth of progress as protection from uncertain variables; both political ‘sides’ seem united in this, arguing over what rules are to imposed in order to “go forward”.
The subservience to rules and mental conservatism, in a world that we have made ever more complex and dynamic is widespread and I see it all levels. In these situations, rules become less suitable (you might be interested in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin for a look at Dave Snowden’s comparison of problem spaces and appropriate decision shaping behaviours).
So the cultural news bias, based on the shared threat (Nature threatens ‘our Progress’), rather than the racial one I jumped on when commenting above is present, I’d agree. I’m not certain that it is especially prominent in the news any more than it is insidiously embedded in everyday thought, deed and word, I’d like to know what you think. Nor am I convinced that it is a particular issue – the Australian flood doesn’t really seem to be our problem any more than Brazil’s, equally terrible though they may be. But actually, it is more our problem, more connected. This is what happens when People Like Us Live Like Us; when we follow the teaching of Troy McClure, of The Simpsons; you may recall him from such informational videos as ‘Man Against Nature: The Route To Victory!’ That type of context is missing though, and all it leaves is this unexplained bias, to guess at the reasons for.
Note to self: read more carefully before/if opening big mouth…
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I want to know about the painting at the top of the post. Who painted it? What does it depict (beyond the obvious, that is).
Thanks
Added to all above, I think a lot of the media are just plain lazy. Most reporting doesn’t seem to consist of going out and researching what’s happening in the world in order to report it – but rather a simple repeating of what’s been said elsewhere. So once a story really gets going (in english) than all other english speaking media will repeat it – the more it is said, the more it gets repeated. No doubt most of the origional local reports of Brazilian floods weren’t in english and therefore was off the radar.
Further evidence that this is, as Paul suggests, a lot more complicated than race or familiarity alone, comes from looking at similar effects on a more local scale. There was flooding going on in Australia long before the flashflooding in Toowoomba and the floods in Brisbane, but these were in smaller regional towns. Rockhampton, Emerald, Dalby for example. It was news here (in Australia) but not “major disasters’. Once Brisbane was affected, then the media coverage became absolutely blanket here – and the floods that were still going on in those other places, were largely forgotten. What was truly dismaying was how bad the coverage actually was at giving accurate information – easilly checked facts, like simple geography of which streams flow where, were incorrectly reported over and over – once one source of media incorrectly reported that Lockyer Ck flows into Wivenhoe dam – they all did it over and over – don’t television stations have access to google maps? (it joins the Brisbane River downstream from the Dam).
As someone else commented, yes, now we have all the ‘how did this happen’ ‘who is to blame’ nonsence because we couldn’t possibly admit that some things (like big floods) simply can’t be stopped by culture and development.
Racism? Perhaps…but defined like this the concept is so pervasive it loses meaning. Would Sri Lankan media be racist if it gave more column inches to events in India than to some upheaval or tragedy unfolding in Germany or Chile? What about the UK over France (for reasons of shared history and substantial emigre populations)? Acdemics of a post-modern, ‘post-colonial’ persuasion use the term ‘othering’ to describe the habitual unconscious superiority complex of white, European males. By implication minority status (women, black, muslim, LGTB, disabled etc) confers automatic subaltern-hero/victim status warranting proactive, special treatment. The trouble is that when the ‘Other’ is defined in such an essentialist way it becomes a very blunt instrumen — good for bashing the usual suspects at the top of the tree, but very bad at addressing complex relationships between individuals and groups…relationships based on shifting power ratios and resources, multiple identities bla bla. Having said that I think you are right about events which challenge the myth of progress. If it could happen to them it could happen to us! But I don’t think that is racism – just a well developed human faculty for sifting and prioritizing information. There are good practical reasons why food riots in Paris or Berlin would be of greater cause to concern for inhabitants of London than disorder in Tunisia.That is not racism – just 2 million years of evolution and a biological computer capable of scanning multiple threats…dynamic social, ecological, physical contexts….and sources of insecurity….and or course an equally biologically rooted we-identity which prioritises near over more distantly connected/related communities. Which is why UK coverage of the flooding in Pakistan was still greater than of the earthquake in China. Not racism unless all human beings are defined as racist….qua human.
Paul,
Excellent piece and I believe that there is a lot of truth in what you say with respect the reasons behind the varying intensity of coverage of the three events. That said, I believe that there are also other factors that play into the coverage, particularly with respect the saturation coverage of the flooding in Australia. The most obvious alternative factor is Australia’s long history of a thriving and vibrant Fourth Estate. But more importantly, I believe, are the secondary and tertiary impacts of the flooding in Australia: the extensive damage to the coal mines and wheat fields in the affected areas are driving huge price increases in grain and energy worldwide which is magnifying the impact of the floods massively. And these second and third order effects are impacting people irrespective the color of their skin (or the content of their character). So perhaps in this case the news media in not completely inappropriate with respect the intensity of their coverage.
Best,
Scott
An excellent post.
the death toll in Brazil rose to 800+!
Yesterday (22/2/11) a journalist from one of the broadsheets (I forget which one, they’re all much of a muchness) was speaking on BBC television news regarding the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. She openly admitted that she found the incident more ‘real’, and somehow more shocking, because it was in a ‘developed’ westernised city – i.e. they were ‘People Like Us’.
As Paul quite rightly points out this goes way beyond traditional ideas of ‘race’ or ‘class’; perhaps we should be talking about blatant Civilisationism or Progressism?
On reading this post I was reminded reminded me of a famous Ghandi quote. When asked what he thought of Western civilization he replied “I think it would be a good idea.” ;-)
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