Bring Out Your Dead
With the South Asia earthquake already off the front pages of the tabloids, it falls to lonely bloggers to deliver the final, definitive tally, one presumes. As far as Hurricane Katrina (remember that?) is concerned, journalist Robert Lindsay gives the latest official figure: 1,337.
BBC radio was giving an official death figure for the earthquake zone of 53,000 this morning, but it is of course still early days, with much recovery work still not started, and the winter to come for the 2 million or so homeless people.
Still, isn't it interesting that you're more likely to read about the non-existent death count from a currently non-existent epidemic of a currently non-existent human strain of Bird Flu than you are to spot news about the still-suffering earthquake victims. Because made-up news sells more tabloids than boring old fact-reporting.
posted by Anonymous at
Monday, October 17, 2005
1 Comments:
Hey thx so much for the link, guys. It's now up to 1,359.This post is great. The entire media has become one gigantic National Inquirer. While I'm glad to update the death toll and get the blog traffic (FWIW) and ego cocktails, really, this shouldn't be my job! The amount of legwork it took me to do this story was not great at all. There was some work at the beginning, but updating it is not very hard or time-consuming. It is WORK, so maybe that is why the media isn't doing it?
How come the media can't do this, anyway? Are they incapable, or just not interested? Let me tell you, when the media stops tracking down real stories and leaves that to the non-pros amongst us, the journalism profession is just about dead. I guess now it's just all business, and all whatever sells copies.
BTW, the appalling count for Pakistan is now 79,000, an incredible number.
By
Robert Lindsay, at 7:51 am
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