US BROADCASTERS BRUSH DARFUR ASIDE, FAVOR JACKSON TRIAL
19 July 2005

A new study shows major US broadcasters have brushed genocide in Darfur aside, while giving widespread coverage to the trial of popstar Michael Jackson. Glolablinfo.org writes that "U.S. broadcast media are failing to provide even minimal coverage of the ongoing crisis".

Analysis shows that major US media outlets gave an astonishing 50 times more coverage of the Jackson trial than was given to the bloody crisis in Darfur, Sudan. When actor Tom Cruise denounced psychiatry on national television, US media gave him "roughly 12 times the amount of coverage that was devoted to Sudan during all of June".

The report cites declining foreign news budgets for major news organizations, itself an troubling trend, in a political climate in which global affairs seem to be more important to understanding economic and political trends at home. Globalization and global terrorism, as well as the nascent International Criminal Court and trends in the rule of law in the international sphere, make it urgently necessary that the average citizen have more, not less, access to global news and information.

What's more, the world as a whole has been slow to recognize and act to halt the genocide in Darfur. It has been NGOs and activists in the US who pushed the US government to use the word "genocide" despite UN fears that the use of the term would lead to precipitate decisions to intervene militarily.

During all of 2004, when Darfur was most violently ravaged by ethnic cleansing and racial killings, even as a civil war continued in the south of the country, and rebels in the east gave signs of open rebellion against the Khartoum government, major US broadcasters gave only 26 minutes of evening news coverate between them to the story, one one-thousandth of the time spent on evening news programs.

The figures become increasingly troubling, as major news sources appear to prize the trivial over the grave: Martha Stewart's financial fraud case and minimal prison term garnered 130 minutes of coverage on the same big three networks' evening programs, five times more than the tens of thousands of murders in Darfur.

The study also found, in what signals a new extreme in the "distraction factor" for television news, that the so-called "runaway bride" was given four times the coverage of Darfur on the three major broadcast networks and the three major cable news stations combined. In this case, there could easily be said to be literally no public service value whatsoever in the reporting of her story, yet it still outstripped by a wide margin the most brutal mass slaughter of human beings presently taking place on the planet.

In light of the figures arising from this study of media trends, it becomes painfully necessary to ask what exactly the US news media are doing. Where are they aiming their words and pictures? What service to they imagine they are providing? And, do they honestly believe that people sit down to watch serious news programs in hopes of finding they have been pre-empted for gossip-magazine shows and tabloid journalism?

A study of international news reporting in the US, Germany, South Africa and the Middle East, for the period from January 2004 through March 2005 found that among them, Darfur and Congo, the two worst humanitarian crises in the world, were given less than 1.5% of all international coverage. South African media and Al Jazeera were found to be "significantly more attentive to the conflicts in Africa than their U.S. or German counterparts".

The major question facing readers, viewers, and media executives, is whether these trends are a sign of the overall decay of the integrity of major media in the US and in other developed societies. The First Amendment to the US Constitution gives unlimited freedom to the press precisely because its ability to work freely and to tell the crucial stories of any given moment is vital to the health and longevity of a real democratic system.

If the media are no longer acting in the public interest, if they are squandering their professional and journalistic capital on gossip and sensationalist exaggeration of entirely trivial subjects, if they ignore issues like the killing of tens of thousands of civilians... the state of participatory democracy is at risk, because the voters will not know for what to hold their representatives accountable, in the face of history. [s]