Shock catastrophic events are treated popularly as the highlight of disasters, making them attractive to media, and easy to be embedded in the collective mind. They are easy to sell, and easy to forget. The "hard" part of the cycle that maintains interest on the disaster is short. It is well known for instance how important it is to target fund raising efforts at that time, or generate a momentum to change policy that will help with the recovery and will prepare to avoid similar circumstances. Soft disasters most often do not even have the privilege of this peak of media attention. They are "soft" not in their severity, with the opposite often being true, but soft in lacking a shock impact to be aware of them. They are soft in being typically persistent, where the disgrace grows bigger and bigger over a prolonged period of time, to the point that it would seem that they are difficult to look at. Droughts, heatwaves, and epidemics are the type of soft disasters that unless create a gruesome event or fact, seem to become secondary. The situation in Somalia is unfortunately too good an example.

The image above shows a partial snapshot of the Managing News dashboard, shortly after having established the first groups for tracking disasters news worldwide with an emphasis on the recent Cyclone Nargis that swept Myanmar and the Sichuan Earthquake in China. While the map represented the disproportionate nature of these events next to other relatively reoccurring disasters of smaller scale, the selected headlines by the system were predominantly dedicated to regional USA events of little media impact outside its borders.

Today the biggest news emerging regarding the Shichuan earthquake were the declarations of actress Sharon Stone. It would be easy to blame her for her unfortunate remarks regarding the tragedy as a possible "loss of karma" caused by the Chinese. However, the fact that the tangential declarations of a celebrity become the top feature around such a critical and complex topic resonates as deeply troubling. In this context, the interest would seem to reside not on the tragedy but on the celebrity. This symptom points to a common skewed cultural pattern, which utilizes the events surrounding a disaster eliminating critical thinking and attempting to isolate essential issues from their public exposure. I have commented elsewhere in depth how the critical abuses in Tibet are used to gloss over other equally if not more serious issues within China. This media attention hints at a similar distraction.

Another twist in the apparent media bias treating the disasters of China compared to that of Myanmar is the current push to question the value of the 3 days of mourning called by the dictatorship for the losses of Cyclone Nargis. While it is true that it follows late, and is second to the 3 days called for the Sichuan earthquake, this amount of questioning was absent when the Chinese authorities made their announcement.

Or rather, who did Shari Villarosa speak to? Shari Villarosa is formally the USA Chargé d'Affaires for their Embassy in Rangoon since 2005. Some news outlets have called her in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis the "de facto USA ambassador to Myanmar". During my introduction to Managing News targeting the tracking of disasters I already knew she was one the names I wanted to tag in the system. But I didn't need to: Managing News picked her name up automatically and promoted it to the to the front of the tag cloud. I knew I had to track her because as soon as all media outlets were talking of 100,000 deaths there was no other source but her. Ms. Villarosa had thrown that figure, referring to an unnamed NGO working in Myanmar, and that was the single source of the figure: unconfirmed, unquestioned... Shari had just said it.

Sharp parody from The Onion pointing to the trivialization of disaster reporting in the news. Funny because it isn't...