On the 25th of March some 500,000 people took to the streets in London to protest the proposed cuts to public spending by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government led by David Cameron. Half a million people (the figure reported by the Guardian) is an awful lot of people and, one would assume, a newsworthy number of people. It’s more than four times the population of Dunedin! Yet, at 10am New Zealand time on Sunday morning, some 12 hours after the protests began in the UK, there was not a single mention of this on stuff.co.nz. In fact, the only mention I found of the protests in any New Zealand based news outlet was a tiny and buried story on the TV3 news page. Huh?
THEN about an hour later a story appeared on stuff, copied and pasted from the Associate Press, which stated that protesters in the UK were concerned that the anarchic and violent actions of a few, had overshadowed the peaceful message of many. This story then proceeded to overshadow the peaceful message of many by elaborating on the anarchic and violent actions of a few. Naturally, there were lots of spectacular images of fire and broken windows. It all looked a bit like a Castle Street riot really. Nowhere was there a photo of the thousands of peaceful protestors or of UK Labour leader Ed Miliband speaking to the crowd at Hyde Park and nowhere was there an explanation for why 500,000 ordinary Brits had taken to the streets. NOWHERE.
The news media here and worldwide is often sensationalist and enjoys reporting on emotion, blood, strife and fire. (Did anyone else find the plethora of apocalyptic headlines in relation to the nuclear disaster in Japan completely unnecessary? On March 15th the Dominion Post’s front page literally read “APOCALYPSE NOW”.) However in the case of the UK protest, it’s not as much the sensationalism that grinds my gears, as the fact that it received practically no coverage in the New Zealand media at all. Half a million people protesting against their government is newsworthy goddammit! Is it possible that other major world events have gone unreported here in the past? Has the information revolution helped our isolated nation at all??
What this has taught me more than anything, is that you cannot rely on populist news websites for extensive and balanced coverage of international current affairs. (I should probably lump domestic affairs in with this - last week amidst a potential Labour Party leadership coup stuff.co.nz led their website with a story about Daniel Vettori’s facial hair. No joke). This is perhaps an obvious conclusion, but an important one. If you desire to know about the happenings on our planet, that don’t involve cats stuck in trees or vegetables resembling pop icons, don’t rely on stuff.co.nz. Read around! The internet is bursting with all kinds of interesting information that, apparently, New Zealand journalists cannot be bothered to find.
Diatribe #2
