Hans Suter emailed the following to Tom with a link to Ethan Zuckerman's Is Israel a problem for the Democratic Republic of Congo?
Dear Tom, the mental image of core and gap in the largest number possible of people is easily one of the most important items in the political process of the core.Tom's comment:
Nathan Zuckerman has an excellent post on this. To wet your appetite here an extract:With forty times the violent death toll, you’d expect to hear a bit more about conflicts in central Africa - instead, Congo, Uganda and Sudan rank #1, #2, and #3 on Alertnet’s list of “forgotten emergencies.” Through hard work and advocacy by activists and journalists, many Americans have some awareness of the conflict in Darfur. But the deteriorating peace process in Sudan gets lots less attention than the details of the current Israeli incursion in Lebanon.The other two conflicts almost never make the news, even when major developments occur. DR Congo will have elections on July 30th, a chance for the first democratically elected government in that unhappy nation since the US helped overthrow Patrice Lumumba and install Africa’s greatest kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko. The elections are difficult, fraught with infrastructure issues, political tensions, flares of violence and accusations of fraud. But they’ve merited 6,180 stories for “congo” on Google News over the past month, while “lebanon” yields 96,100 and “israel” yields 136,000.
There are lots of reasons why conflicts in the Middle East garner so much attention. Some are newsgathering factors - news happens where there are reporters to cover it. While many US newspapers are cutting overseas bureaus, most have maintained a major presence in the middle east, often in Baghdad and Jerusalem. And most don’t have bureaus in Kinshasa, Kisengani, or even Nairobi. Newspapers have finite staff resources, and the conflict in Lebanon is demanding the attention from those reporters, as Joe Strupp reports in a story for Editor and Publisher:
The most important measure of connectivity is caring. Israel is hugely connected, so when it acts, we care, because we can see it. Congo is amazingly unconnected, so when far larger numbers die there under the same levels of injustice or insanity or whatever, no one cares. In the end, right or wrong has nothing to do with it. It's where you can get the reporters to cover and the cameramen to film.