SAJA member Jonathan Foreman writes about the recent Hyderabad bombings in National Review Online. From "Buried by the News: The Deaths of Civilians in Hyderabad is Not a Media Priority":
This weekend saw an extraordinary demonstration of strangely selective “news value” in the British and U.S. media. On Saturday night a pair of synchronized bombs ripped apart two crowded nightspots in Hyderabad, India. The explosions killed 42 people and wounded at least a hundred more. Since the attacks, police have found and diffused 19 more bombs at movie theaters, bus stops, and pedestrian bridges.
As far as I can tell this slaughter was not important enough to make the front page of any major newspaper in Britain or America. Why? Well, one thing is certain: It is not as if bombs go off every day in Hyderabad, which happens to be one of India’s key industrial cities. Moreover, it is not as if India is not on the world’s media map these days.
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Why then has it been relegated to the inside pages along with the death of former French premier Raymond Barre, and the stalling of war crimes trials in Liberia? One plausible explanation for the minimal coverage is that the Western media’s pace-setters somehow regard murdered Indians as of lesser value than dead people of more favored ethnicity. Not just less important than Americans, Europeans, and Japanese, but less important than Palestinians, Iraqis, Israelis and so forth. If 42 people were killed in the West Bank you can be dead sure it would be front-page news.But I suspect that the true answer follows a different line: it is simply that the men and women at the front of the media herd have invested their resources in certain places, for reasons that are a mixture of politics and practicality. Everywhere else falls into the category of backwater.
Read the full piece. Read other NRO pieces by Foreman as well as JF-dot-com (that's a photo of him from his days reporting from Iraq). See recent SAJAforum posting about another Foreman piece, "PAKISTAN: A British Woman's Impact on Remotest Pakistan."
Asked by SAJAforum to update us on his whereabouts, Foreman says:
I'm currently based in London and hoping to get some more South Asian assignments after the summer. I'm also involved in the launch of a new political and cultural monthly, title to be decided, that will rival "Prospect" and will, I hope, cover South Asia much more consistently than most British and American publications. I should add that I'd be happy to meet or help out in any way I can any SAJAers visiting London.
[Foreman can be reached at jonathanforeman at aol.com - but due to volume of e-mail, he may not be able to reply to everyone]
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