There has been a heck of a lot of big news stories this week: the stampede in Cambodia, the explosion at the Greymouth coal mine in New Zealand and the ensuing hope and then despair as the second explosion occurred, as well as the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island by North Korea. Yet it seems the coverage has been anything but fair. Naturally, the Greymouth mine tragedy has been heavily present in the Australian media not least because of our close proximity to New Zealand, but does this mean that the deaths of over 400 hundred people in Cambodia are any less significant?
After the initial reports of the Cambodian stampede, the Australian media seemed to forget about the hows and whys of the disaster despite it being labelled as the greatest disaster for Cambodia since the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Today, whilst the religious ceremony to mourn the deaths of those who died in the stampede is the top story on BBC News it only garners a fleeting agency-sourced flash story across most of the main Australian news sites. The ceremony doesn't rate a mention on News.com.au or The Daily Telegraph leaving it up to the ABC and The Australian to provide brief pieces on the reaction in Cambodia to such an horrendous event.
Once again it raises questions about the news values of the mainstream media in dealing with disasters and the manipulation of such events to best match the emotiveness of the audience, something seen with the Pakistan floods earlier this year in which aid donations were lower than anticipated due to the assumption that floods don't have the same emotional weight as other types of disasters. Unfortunately this type of selective coverage has become ingrained in the Western media and will no doubt continue as newspapers cut back on foreign staff and rely heavily on agency feeds.
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