It isn’t a frivolous thing to protest against the way in which people expect to view Africa (and the rest of the third world for that matter, where skins are dark and palm trees feather the skyline). I know Hurricane Ike was a bastard, and ripped up the southern Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos and slammed Cuba and is now going to hammer Texas. I know this, and so do you.
But is there any excuse for the kind of coverage provided below?
BBC NEWS | Americas | Paradise flattened in storm’s wake
Here are other ways in which the BBC has reported on the storm:
Images of Ike (almost all of Cuba, which racks up the heartstring points)
And here is how the local media covered it:
Images of Ike damage in Inagua, including millions of dollars’ damage at Morton Salt
My conclusion: our lens sees damage. The lens of the BBC seeks human distress.
All the better to underline, once again, and subtly (or not-so-subtly) the wonders of being civilized.
I wrong?
***
(15/09/08) Edit: So maybe a little wrong, and certainly a lot biased. Here are some other links to consider before weighing in on the discussion:
New York Times on Ike (May require a password to view)
{ 7 comments }
I do think you have a point, but OTOH I seem to remember last year when there was heavy flooding across the UK, the BBC was pretty keen on trying to present that in terms of human distress, as well. Human interest stories always make for more engaging journalism than financial damage estimates, and I think they would always like to find a heartstring-tugging angle if they can.
Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a difference in the way they present a story about a storm hitting Cuba or Haiti to one hitting Florida.
I love this! I love being able to make a comment about some institution halfway around the world and have someone with maybe more information or a different point of view come round and give you a different perspective.
Thanks, Harry.
Anybody else?
Dear Nico,
These are my humble opinions. Regarding the BBC story, the word paradise in the headline is irritating. Other than that I think it is a solid human interest piece. I think the photographs in the next one are compelling, and yes , sad, I feel the sadness of the people and this is the photographer’s job. All good stories are human stories. Regarding the local coverage, well. I can’t see a thing worth looking at in the photos from the air, the photograph of the classroom shows nothing, the photo of the damaged home would have been better if the homeowner had been in the photo. Frankly I’m less interested in how the Morton factory held up and more interested in how the people held up, how they are now, and what is being done to assist them. And what the bloody hell is up with the prime minister? What is he grinning about? Is he drunk? This crappy coverage is brought to us courtesy of the Bahamas Information Service, the government’s public relations department, and not by a real news service at all.
Thank you for asking.
In hope.
Hey there Nico, I hear what you are saying, but I have to agree that stories about the toll on human beings is more engaging than seeing photographs of the damage sans the emotional impact on human beings… what I would have liked to see were people’s own words about how they feel and as I say that, I know this too is fraught, when you have white British or US journalists holding the mics to brown people’s faces and asking/telling them to speak their stories… how their words are angled is fraught with first world assumptions about who is helpless and who isn’t… But, the more I think about this and compare to footage of folks preparing for Ike in Texas, there is still a sense (through the images) that in first world landscapes people have some modicum of agency, whereas lines of people seemingly waiting for assistance (Cuba) is the kind of image people on the other end of first world lenses are comfortable seeing… Thanks for your words.
I could not help but be suprised by the geometric layout of Inagua (as shown in the first photo.) How many people now live there? How many are employees of Morton Salt? Are people going to be forced to migrate because of the damage? What consequences are we going to take? I live here in Germany, where the European
press is constantly ‘informing’ the public about the pain, poverty, and corruption that exist elsewhere, there is always the subtle insinuation that these conditions are totally self inflicted and that they don´t and could´nt exist in Europe. It would be an unexpected, but pleasant surprise to have sensitive coverage of a third world disaster by any international media organisation, but what excuse does our own media give for the derth of information and the shabby coverage?
Thanks, sistas, for weighing in. It’s good to be reminded of the complete lack of engagement of our own press/pressoids (thanks, Lynn) while criticizing the lens of others. Thanks for setting that straight.
I was pretty biased in posting this, focussing exclusively on the BBC. Part of that is that the European presses tend to be, as Madeleine says, oddly smug in their coverage of the extra-European world, as though in subtle justification of their imperial past. But I should not have excluded the efforts of our contemporary imperialist. And those efforts are somewhat different, less didactic, more … I don’t know. I’ll edit them in over the next day or so, see whether they provoke different discussions. The subtle messages are still there but differently expressed, IMO.
I would like to say that while there is a lot of blame to go around when it comes to the Bahamian press, most of it rests with those who hold the purse strings and sit on the editorial desks. To them we turn for vision, for confidence, for support, to us they turn their backs.
I think there is still truth in the statement that stories about the third world can be narrow-minded but it’s hard to compare when we, as a nation, don’t meet the standards for good reporting.
former Bahamian reporter
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