Why does media forget some huge catastrophes?
Javier Ramos; Perugia- Haiti earthquake.1,5 million homeless because of that. Pakistan floods. 1,5 million homeless as a result of it. So, what happenned to note that everyone knows about Haiti but people hardly have information of Pakistan?
That´s the issue that centered the conversation in a session of the Internation Journalism Festival in Perugia. A lot of resources and journalists were sent to Hait, but that wasn´t the case of Pakistan, which got very little coverage from media.
“The earthquake in Haiti took place suddenly, and it was a good place to get some stunning images about looting or burning”, said Giovanni Porzio, a journalist which accumulates 30 years of experience and has reported all around the world, incluiding Haiti.
“In Pakistan things were more graduable, it took some weeks to get to the flooding situation”, remarked Porzio, who told that “Pakistan is a region which is frequently associated with danger and terrorism, so maybe that´s another point”.
Disinformation can come with previous disinformation about the country where things happen. “Pakistan is further away less easy to find than Haiti”, stated Paola Zanuttini, a journalist from ‘La Repubblica’ who travelled to Haiti six months after the catastrophe to speak about the aftermath. She thinks that earthquakes have more coverage than other issues because “they are unexpected, come from below, may be associated with the devil and they are something we are scared of”.
This journalist also focused the attention in people who dies as a parameter that media use to decide if they have to give huge coverage to some catastrophe. “The dead is the big thing in the headlines”, stablished.
Also assisted to the pannel the former director of communication of Doctors Without Borders in Italy, Sergio Cecchini, and Paola Mazzoni, a sociologist who has worked with that humanitarian organization.
Mazzoni explained the tasks that Doctors Without Borders use to develop abroad, while Cecchini remembered that his association was founded by both journalists and doctors so he told that they have to put the accent on forgotten problems. Spectacular or not, remote or nearby, there are still being human dramas.
Javier.ramos@elreferente.es /javier.ramos99@gmail.com
