I asked this question earlier “Are Mumbai blast victims not that important?“.
Hyderabad blast victims
img: via Gulf Times
Jonathan Foreman brings up a similar question about the coverage of the recent Hyderabad blasts largely being ignored by the media in the West (link via SAJA Forum).
From Foreman’s article on National Review:
One plausible explanation for the minimal coverage is that the Western media’s pace-setters somehow regard murdered Indians as of lesser value than dead people of more favored ethnicity. Not just less important than Americans, Europeans, and Japanese, but less important than Palestinians, Iraqis, Israelis and so forth. If 42 people were killed in the West Bank you can be dead sure it would be front-page news.
Coming from South Asian bloggers, that sentence would be potrayed as “playing the victim card”. However, this is from someone who would probably be counted among the American conservative think-tank, which normally frowns upon such.
If you think Foreman’s statement about (the utter lack of) Western media coverage of terrorism victims in India is a reach, here’s another blurb I caught in the Times of India online the other day -
in the past 3 or so years, India has lost more lives to terrorism than any other country in the world, except Iraq ………….
In fact, India has since 2004 lost more lives to terrorist incidents than all of North America, South America, Central America, Europe and Eurasia put together. All of these vast swathes of the globe lost a total of 3,280 lives in terrorist incidents between January 2004 and March this year. India alone lost 3,674 lives over the same period of three years and three months.
………… and yet solely looking at news reports in the Western media, one could be forgiven if they did not consider India as one of the top two vacation spots for terrorists.
Foreman goes on to explain that the lack of coverage could be attributed to factors like absence of resources on the Indian subcontinent.
But I suspect that the true answer follows a different line: it is simply that the men and women at the front of the media herd have invested their resources in certain places, for reasons that are a mixture of politics and practicality. Everywhere else falls into the category of backwater.
Hyderabad is backwater simply because it is far away. Editors don’t have hundreds of reporters on the spot waiting and hoping for action. More importantly, they don’t have any pre-packaged opinions of causes or solutions to whatever problem prompted the bombing. They don’t vacation in Hyderabad, and they don’t understand that South Asia is strategically at least as important as Israel/Palestine.
While this explanation carries some weight too, I suspect the answer is a combination of both. But considering that the United States and Britain are so gung-ho on global terrorism, it is surprising that the MSM in the West still won’t recognize the fact that India is, in fact, one of biggest victims of terrorism.
Again I ask, why?
Also refer to Karthik’s original post on the Hyderabad blasts.
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