Tsunami Disaster Highlights Corporate Media Hypocrisy

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1230-15.htm
by Peter Phillips

Peter complains that

"The US corporate media coverage of the tsunami disaster exposes a huge hypocrisy in the US press. Left uncovered this past year was the massive disaster that has befell Iraqi civilians."

Come on....

to be fair you should note that the tsunami killed FAR more people in a few hours than the war in iraq has killed over several years.

Iraqi body count - 15-17,000
Tsunami deaths somwhere between 125,000-400,000

excess deaths (note this is a little different from direct deaths) in iraq could be as high as 100,000
excess deaths in south east asia could theoretically be close to 1 million due to the numbers of homeless the damage to infrastructure the spread of disease and so forth.

comparing the coverage there would be a few thousand times more iraq war articles than tsunami articles (mostly because the iraq war had gone on longer). If anything the iraq war is VASTLY over covered not quite as badly as palestine vs israel and sept 11 are over covered but more so than most events including just restricting ourselves to those that involve violence for the moment - sudan (dafur) the congo and many other events. Actually violent events are hugely over represented temselves - deaths by AIDS starvation and so forth.

This fellow sure as hell picked the wrong comparison here - he should instead try comparing it to the excessive attention we pay to palestine or something like that instead.