I was in Clifton today patronizing the Esquire movie theater. As I left the theater, I bumped into a casual acquaintance of mine from Cincinnati. This fellow seemed amazed to see me. “What are you doing over here?” he asked in disbelief, as if our chance encounter had just happened on the Champs Elysee in Paris.
Everyone from Northern Kentucky, as I am, has such encounters with Cincinnatians on a regular basis. So let me confirm something for Cincinnatians that I know they already believe: On those rare occasions when people from Northern Kentucky actually buy shoes, we race over to Cincinnati to wear them. (It just feels so natural walking around in shoes on your concrete paths.)
Obviously, as Cincinnatians can well imagine, it’s quite a journey to drive a car a couple of miles and cross a bridge over a river. But if you’ll observe the license plates on the cars tooling around in your “Center of the Universe,” you’ll notice that Kentuckians do so regularly. You might try it some time. (There’s no truth to the rumor that monsters live in the Ohio River.)
By the way, you know how “youse guys” are always fretting about how Cincinnati is beginning to resemble a ghost town? Just cross the river and you’ll discover where everyone went.
Tsunami and Media Hypocrisy
The terrible earthquake/ tsunami disaster along coastlines of the Indian Ocean left tens of thousands dead and many times more people homeless and weakened. Front pages news stories swept the U.S. corporate media — 12,000 dead and then 40,000, 60,000 and 100,000 made progressive day-by-day headlines. Twenty-four hour TV news provided minute-by-minute updates with added photos and live aerial shots of the affected regions.
As the days after unfolded, personal stories of survival and loss were added to the overall coverage. Unique stories such as the 20-day-old miracle baby found floating on a mattress and the 8-year-old who lost both parents and later was found by her uncle were human interest features. Individualized reports from Americans caught in the catastrophe made national news, and the numbers of Europeans and North Americans involved were a key part of the continuing story. U.S. embassies set up hotlines for relatives of possible victims to seek information.
Quickly added into the corporate media mix was coverage on how the U.S. was responding with relief aid and dollars. In Crawford, Texas, President Bush announced that he had formed an international coalition to respond to the massive tsunami disaster.
The U.S. corporate media coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, for most Americans, was shocking and emotional. Empathic Americans, with the knowledge that a terrible natural disaster of huge significance to hundreds of thousands people had occurred, wanted to help in any way they could. Church groups held prayer sessions for the victims, and the Red Cross received an upsurge of donations.
But the tsunami disaster coverage exposes a huge hypocrisy in the American press. Left uncovered this past year was the massive disaster that’s befell Iraqi civilians. Over 100,000 civilians have died since the beginning of the U.S. invasion, and hundreds of thousands more are homeless and weakened. In late October 2004, the British Lancet medical journal published a scientific survey of households in Iraq that calculated over 100,000 civilians, mostly women and children, have died from war-related causes.
The study, formulated and conducted by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University and the College of Medicine at Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, involved a complex process of sampling households across Iraq to compare the numbers and causes of deaths before and after the invasion in March 2003. The most common cause of death was aerial bombing, followed by strokes and heart attacks. Recent civilian deaths in Fallujah would undoubtedly add significantly to the total.
The Iraqi word for disaster is museeba. Surly the loss of life from war in Iraq is as significant a meseeba as the Indian Ocean tsunami, yet where is the U.S. corporate media coverage of thousands of dead and homeless? Where are the live aerial TV shots of the disaster zones and the up-close photos of the victims? Where are the survivor stories — the miracle child who lived through a building collapsed by U.S. bombs and was rescued by neighbors? Where are the government’s official press releases of regret and sorrow? Where is the international coalition for relief of civilians in Iraq and the upsurge in donations for Red Cross intervention? Would not Americans, if they knew, be just as caring about Iraqi deaths as they are for the victims of the tsunami?
The U.S. corporate media has published Pentagon statements on civilian deaths in Iraq as unknown and dismissed the Lancet medical journal study. It seems American media concerns are for victims of natural disasters, while the man-made disasters, such as the deliberate invasion of another country by the U.S., are better left unreported.
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2005.