They're more than numbers, maps and shaky videos
I found this probably overlooked article on csmonitor. I think it's great. It's significant. It's good news, as in "news done responsibly," a way to talk about the tsunami without making all of Southeast Asia look like a mass of dirty, unintelligible brown people.
A factory owner rallies his workers - and reopens doors in Sri LankaA Sri Lankan garment factory owner sheltered his employees and promised to rebuild their houses at no cost.
It makes me wish, again, that the Christian Science Monitor had a bigger voice on the national news scene. Now with Bill Moyers gone and Ted Koppel retiring soon, the future of news media feels (Rather) bleak. But will someone please tell me what the (seemingly non-existent) relationship is between Christian Scientists and The Monitor?
Update: from
newsdissector.orgThe tsunami media coverage is also being criticized by third world journalists: Writes Dipankar De Sarkar, an Indian journalist working with The Panos Institute."
"My main frustration has been with the tone of coverage in the UK media. It's very clear to me that absolutely no lessons have been drawn by the media from well-known studies into how the media covered the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine. These found that there was an overarching emphasis on Western aid agencies and their workers rather than on locals and local iniatives.
"But once again, in the 20th anniversary of that disaster, I find that television coverage of the Tsunami is full of images of active, concerned white men and inactive, helpless, desperate, sobbing brown men and women. This, as we all know from countless past disasters, is not - is never - the case."
* Ray, 1/13/2005 08:10:02 PM
