Sind Gratis-Inhalte im Internet der Untergang des Qualitätsjournalismus?

gowi - 19.09.2010 12:22

Aber Hallo, liebe Herausgeber. Natürlich darf und soll guter Journalismus etwas kosten. Nur liegt es doch auf der Hand, dass die Onlinezeitungen aber auch grosses Sparpotenzial beinhalten. Die ganze, bestimmt nicht billige Printtechnik kann dadurch eingespart werden. Dies soll bitte, bei der ganzen Kostendiskussion mit eingebracht werden. Dann sieht die gesamte Rechnung plötzlich nicht mehr so schlecht aus, oder?

Gast - 15.09.2010 12:25

Gibt es überhaupt noch investigativen Qualitätsjournalismus? ( Ja hier auf diesen Seiten vielleicht, wir werden sehen!) Oder ist es wirklich gleichgeschalteter Erziehungsjournalismus? Opinion Leaders für wen? Von wem gesteuert? Es kann kaum sein dass wir von Blick über Schweizer Fernsehen bis Tagesanzeiger seit Jahren dieselbe Indoktrinierung ertragen müssen. Vielfalt und diversifizierte Meinung und Stellungnahme wäre gefragt und vor allem uns erwachsenen Lesern zu überlassen wie wir dann die Dinge sehen. Es nützt auch ein Club oder Arena bei SF wenig wenn Leute mit Meinungen die dem Zeitgeist ( der ja von den Medien mitgestaltet wird ) nicht entsprechen als Aussenseiter behandelt werden. Das Internet gibt tatsächlich Rätsel auf aber die Mediengleichschaltung eben auch. Wer hat Angst vor der bösen Meinungsfreiheit? Das Internet sicher nicht! Aber Achtung es gibt jetzt schon Kräfte die auch das kontrollieren möchten.

Arnold Johann Kaspar Hottinger - 12.09.2010 14:42

Pardon, mein 2. Zusatz, rein technischer Natur, ich hoffe in der untenstehenden Kopie lässt sich Juan Cole besser lesen:

The Great Pakistani Deluge Never Happened Don’t Tune In, It’s Not Important By Juan Cole

The Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security.  Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American television and out of popular consciousness. 

Don’t think we haven’t been here before.  In the late 1990s, the American mass media could seldom be bothered to report on the growing threat of al-Qaeda.  In 2002, it slavishly parroted White House propaganda about Iraq, helping prepare the way for a senseless war.  No one yet knows just what kind of long-term instability the Pakistani floods are likely to create, but count on one thing: the implications for the United States are likely to be significant and by the time anyone here pays much attention, it will already be too late.

Few Americans were shown -- by the media conglomerates of their choice -- the heartbreaking scenes of eight million Pakistanis displaced into tent cities, of the submerging of a string of mid-sized cities (each nearly the size of New Orleans), of vast areas of crops ruined, of infrastructure swept away, damaged, or devastated at an almost unimaginable level, of futures destroyed, and opportunistic Taliban bombings continuing.  The boiling disgust of the Pakistani public with the incompetence, insouciance, and cupidity of their corrupt ruling class is little appreciated.  

The likely tie-in of these floods (of a sort no one in Pakistan had ever experienced) with global warming was seldom mentioned.  Unlike, say, BBC Radio, corporate television did not tell the small stories -- of, for instance, the female sharecropper who typically has no rights to the now-flooded land on which she grew now-ruined crops thanks to a loan from an estate-owner, and who is now penniless, deeply in debt, and perhaps permanently excluded from the land.  That one of the biggest stories of the past decade could have been mostly blown off by television news and studiously ignored by the American public is a further demonstration that there is something profoundly wrong with corporate news-for-profit.  (The print press was better at covering the crisis, as was publically-supported radio, including the BBC and National Public Radio.)

In his speech on the withdrawal of designated combat units from Iraq last week, Barack Obama put Pakistan front and center in American security doctrine, “But we must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al-Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”  Even if Pakistan were not a major non-NATO ally of the United States, it is the world’s sixth most populous country and the 44th largest economy, according to the World Bank.  The flooding witnessed in the Indus Valley is unprecedented in the country’s modern history and was caused by a combination of increasingly warm ocean water and a mysterious blockage of the jet stream, which drew warm, water-laden air north to Pakistan, over which it burst in sheets of raging liquid.  If the floods that followed prove a harbinger of things to come, then they are a milestone in our experience of global warming, a big story in its own right.

News junkies who watch a lot of television broadcasts could not help but notice with puzzlement that as the cosmic catastrophe unfolded in Pakistan, it was nearly invisible on American networks.  I did a LexisNexis search for the terms “Pakistan” and “flood” in broadcast transcripts (covering mostly American networks) from July 31st to September 4th, and it returned only about 1,100 hits.  A search for the name of troubled actress Lindsay Lohan returned 653 search results in the same period and one for “Iraq,” more than 3,000 hits (the most the search engine will count).  A search for “mosque" and "New York” yielded 1,300 hits.  Put another way, the American media, whipped into an artificial frenzy by anti-Muslim bigots like New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and GOP hatemonger Newt Gingrich, were far more interested in the possible construction of a Muslim-owned interfaith community center two long blocks from the old World Trade Center site than in the sight of millions of hapless Pakistani flood victims.  

Of course, some television correspondents did good work trying to cover the calamity, including CNN’s Reza Sayah and Sanjay Gupta, but they generally got limited air time and poor time slots. (Gupta’s special report on the Pakistan floods aired the evening of September 5th, the Sunday before Labor Day, not exactly a time when most viewers might be expected to watch hard news.)  As for the global warming angle, it was not completely ignored.  On August 13th, reporter Dan Harris interviewed NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show at 7:45 am.  The subject was whether global warming could be the likely cause for the Pakistan floods and other extreme weather events of the summer, with Schmidt pointing out that such weather-driven cataclysms are going to become more common later in the twenty-first century.   Becky Anderson at CNN did a similar segment at 4 pm on August 16th.  My own search of news transcripts suggests that that was about it for commercial television.

The “Worst Disaster” TV Didn’t Cover

It’s worth reviewing the events that most Americans hardly know happened:

The deluge began on July 31st, when heavier than usual monsoon rains caused mudslides in the northwest of Pakistan.  Within two days, the rapidly rising waters had already killed 800 people.  On August 2nd, the United Nations announced that about a million people had been driven from their homes. Among the affected areas was the Swat Valley, already suffering from large numbers of refugees and significant damage from an army offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in the spring-summer of 2009. In the district of Dera Ismail Khan alone, hundreds of villages were destroyed by the floods, forcing shelterless villagers to sleep on nearby raised highways.

The suddenly homeless waited in vain for the government to begin to deliver aid, as public criticism of President Asaf Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani surged.  President Zardari’s opulent trip to France and Britain (during which he visited his chateau in Normandy) at this moment of national crisis was pilloried.  On August 8th in Birmingham, England, a furious Pakistani-British man threw both his shoes at him, repeating a famously humiliating incident in which an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President George W. Bush.  Fearing the response in Pakistan, the president’s Pakistan People’s Party attempted to censor the video of the incident, and media offices in that country were closed down or sometimes violently attacked if they insisted on covering it.  Few or no American broadcast outlets appear to have so much as mentioned the incident, though it pointed to the increasing dissatisfaction of Pakistanis with their elected government.  (The army has gotten better marks for its efficient aid work, raising fears that some ambitious officers could try to parlay a newfound popularity into yet another in the country’s history of military coups.) 

By August 5th, the floods had taken an estimated 1,600 lives, though some aid officials complained (and would continue to do so) that the death toll was far larger than reported.  Unlike the Haitian earthquake or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, this still building and far more expansive disaster was initially greeted by the world community with a yawn.   The following day, the government evacuated another half-million people as the waters headed toward southern Punjab.  At that point, some 12 million Pakistanis had been adversely affected in some way.  On August 7th, as the waters advanced on the southernmost province, Sindh, through some of the country’s richest farmlands just before harvest time, another million people were evacuated.  Prime Minister Gilani finally paid his first visit to some of the flood-stricken regions.

By August 9th, nearly 14 million people had been affected by the deluge, the likes of which had never been experienced in the region in modern history, and at least 20% of the country was under water.  At that point, in terms of its human impact, the catastrophe had already outstripped both the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.  On August 10th, the United Nations announced that six million Pakistanis needed immediate humanitarian aid just to stay alive. 

On August 14th, another half-million people were evacuated from the Sindhi city of Jacobabad.  By now, conspiracy theories were swirling inside Pakistan about landlords who had deliberately cut levees to force the waters away from their estates and into peasant villages, or about the possibility that the U.S. military had diverted the waters from its base at Jacobabad.  It was announced that 18 million Pakistanis had now been adversely affected by the floods, having been displaced, cut off from help by the waters, or having lost crops, farms, and other property.  The next day, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, surveying the damage, pronounced it was “the worst disaster” he had ever seen. 

The following week a second crest of river water hit Sindh Province.  On August 30th, it submerged the city of Sujawal (population 250,000).  The next day, however, there were a mere 16 mentions of Pakistan on all American television news broadcasts, mostly on CNN.  On Labor Day weekend, another major dam began to fail in Sindh and, by September 6th, several hundred thousand more people had to flee from Dadu district, with all but four districts in that rich agricultural province having seen at least some flooding. 

Today, almost six million Pakistanis are still homeless, and many have not so much as received tents for shelter.  In large swaths of the country, roads, bridges, crops, power plants -- everything that matters to the economy -- were inundated and damaged or simply swept away.  Even if the money proves to be available for repairs (and that remains an open question), it will take years to rebuild what was lost and, for many among those millions, the future will mean nothing but immiseration, illness, and death.

Why the Floods Weren’t News    

In the United States, the contrast with the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Haitian earthquake in January and the consequent outpouring of public donations was palpable.  Not only has the United Nations’ plea for $460 million in aid to cover the first three months of flood response still not been met, but in the past week donations seem to have dried up.  The U.S. government pledged $200 million (some diverted from an already planned aid program for Pakistan) and provided helicopter gunships to rescue cut-off refugees or ferry aid to them.

What of American civil society?  No rock concerts were organized to help Pakistani children sleeping on highways or in open fields infested with vermin.  No sports events offered receipts to aid victims at risk from cholera and other diseases.  It was as if the great Pakistani deluge were happening in another dimension, beyond the ken of Americans. 

A number of explanations have been offered for the lack of empathy, or even interest, not to speak of a visible American unwillingness to help millions of Pakistanis.  As a start, there were perfectly reasonable fears, even among Pakistani-Americans, that such aid money might simply be pocketed by corrupt government officials.  But was the Haitian government really so much more transparent and less corrupt than the Pakistani one? 

It has also been suggested that Americans suffer from donor fatigue, given the string of world disasters in recent years and the bad domestic economy.  On August 16th, for instance, Glenn Beck fulminated: “We can't keep spending. We are broke! Game over… no one is going to ride in to save you… You see the scene in Pakistan? People were waiting in line for aids [sic] from floods. And they were complaining, how come the aid is not here?  Look, when America is gone, who's going to save the people in Pakistan? See, we got to change this one, because we're the ones that always ride in to save people.” 

Still, the submerging of a fifth of a country the size of Pakistan is -- or at least should be -- a dramatic global event and even small sums, if aggregated, would matter.  (A dollar and a half from each American would have met the U.N. appeal.)  Some have suggested that the Islamophobia visible in the debate about the Park 51 Muslim-owned community center in lower Manhattan left Americans far less willing to donate to Muslim disaster victims.

And what of those national security arguments that nuclear-armed Pakistan is crucial not just to the American war in Afghanistan, but to the American way of life?  Ironically, the collapse of the neoconservative narrative about what it takes to make the planet’s “sole superpower” secure appears to have fallen on President Obama’s head.  One of the few themes he adopted wholeheartedly from the Bush administration has been the idea that a poor Asian country of 170 million halfway around the world, facing a challenge from a few thousand rural fundamentalists, is the key to the security of the United States. 

If the Pakistani floods reveal one thing, it’s that Americans now look on such explanations through increasingly jaundiced eyes.  At the moment, no matter whether it’s the Afghan War or those millions of desperate peasants and city dwellers in Pakistan, the public has largely decided to ignore the AfPak theater of operations.  It’s not so surprising.  Having seen the collapse of our financial system at the hands of corrupt financiers produce mass unemployment and mass mortgage foreclosures, they have evidently decided, as even Glenn Beck admits, it’s “game over” for imperial adventures abroad. 

Another explanation may also bear some weight here, though you won’t normally hear much about it.  Was the decision of the corporate media not to cover the Pakistan disaster intensively a major factor in the public apathy that followed, especially since so many Americans get their news from television? 

The lack of coverage needs to be explained, since corporate media usually love apolitical, weather-induced disasters.  But covering a flood in a distant Asian country is, for television, expensive and logistically challenging, which in these tough economic times may have influenced programming decisions.  Obviously, there is as well a tendency in capitalist news to cover what will attract advertising dollars.  Add to this the fact that, unlike the Iraq “withdrawal” story or the “mosque at Ground Zero” controversy, the disaster in Pakistan was not a political football between the GOP and the Democratic Party.  What if, in fact, Americans missed this calamity mostly because a bad news story set in a little-known South Asian country filled with Muslim peasants is not exactly “Desperate Housewives” and couldn’t hope to sell tampons, deodorant, or Cialis, or because it did not play into domestic partisan politics?   

The great Pakistani deluge did not exist, it seems, because it was not on television, would not have delivered audiences to products, and was not all about us.  As we saw on September 11, 2001, and again in March 2003, however, the failure of our electronic media to inform the public about centrally important global developments is itself a security threat to the republic.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.  His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website. You can catch him discussing flooded Pakistan on the latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

Copyright 2010 Juan Cole

Arnold Johann Kaspar Hottinger - 12.09.2010 14:32

Dies ist eine Illustration zu dem was ich in einem ersten Kommentar meinte in Bezug auf die amerikanische Presse. Sie stammt von Juan Cole, dem Verfasser eines Blogs, der seit Jahren mehr und ebsser über den nahen osten unterrichtet als alle Zeitungen, die ich kenne. Ich empfehle ihn bei jeder Gelegenheit. Der beitrag ist realtiv lang, erfordert einige Aufmerksamkeit. Doch dies ist der wirkliche preis, den man dafpr zu bezahlen hat, dass man unterrichtet sein will. Alles andere geht aus dem langen Zitat hervor, das ich hier kopiere. Natürlich mit Dank an den Verfasser Jaun Cole.

* Email
* Print
* Share

Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Media as a Security Threat to America Posted by Juan Cole at 10:15am, September 9, 2010.

Call it strange or call it symptomatic. These last weeks, Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has been on a “media blitz.” He’s been giving out interviews as if they were party favors. Yet, as far as I can tell, not a single interviewer has asked him anything like: “General Petraeus, twenty percent of Pakistan, which supposedly harbors Osama bin Laden and various militant groups involved in the Afghan War, and whose intelligence agency reportedly has an ongoing stake in the Afghan Taliban, is now underwater. Roads, bridges, railway lines, and so U.S. supply lines have been swept away. How do you expect this cataclysm to affect the Afghan War in the short and long term?”

In these last weeks, the Afghan War has once again been front-page news. Yet only a single reporter -- the heroic Carlotta Gall of the New York Times -- has thought to focus on the subject of how the Biblical-style floods in Pakistan might affect the U.S. war effort and the overstretched supply lines that play a major role in supporting U.S. troops there. While you could learn about rising violence in Afghanistan, the perilous state of the Kabul Bank, and many other subjects, reporting on the floods and the war has been nil, with even speculative pieces on the subject largely nonexistent.

We know next to nothing about how U.S. supplies are now getting to Afghanistan, or how much the cost of getting them there has risen, or how this might affect U.S. operations in that country. Given the scale of the catastrophe and the degree to which the U.S. is embedded in the region, you might at least expect the American media to be flooded with commentary on what the event could mean for us. Think again. As Juan Cole (who runs Informed Comment, which offers the best running commentary available on the Middle East and whose most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World) indicates, this startling journalistic blank spot is just a modest part of a far larger blankness when it comes to one of the truly horrific weather events in modern memory. Don't miss Cole discussing flooded Pakistan on the latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here. Tom

The Great Pakistani Deluge Never Happened 
Don’t Tune In, It’s Not Important 
By Juan Cole

The Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security.  Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American television and out of popular consciousness. 

Don’t think we haven’t been here before.  In the late 1990s, the American mass media could seldom be bothered to report on the growing threat of al-Qaeda.  In 2002, it slavishly parroted White House propaganda about Iraq, helping prepare the way for a senseless war.  No one yet knows just what kind of long-term instability the Pakistani floods are likely to create, but count on one thing: the implications for the United States are likely to be significant and by the time anyone here pays much attention, it will already be too late.

Few Americans were shown -- by the media conglomerates of their choice -- the heartbreaking scenes of eight million Pakistanis displaced into tent cities, of the submerging of a string of mid-sized cities (each nearly the size of New Orleans), of vast areas of crops ruined, of infrastructure swept away, damaged, or devastated at an almost unimaginable level, of futures destroyed, and opportunistic Taliban bombings continuing.  The boiling disgust of the Pakistani public with the incompetence, insouciance, and cupidity of their corrupt ruling class is little appreciated.  

The likely tie-in of these floods (of a sort no one in Pakistan had ever experienced) with global warming was seldom mentioned.  Unlike, say, BBC Radio, corporate television did not tell the small stories -- of, for instance, the female sharecropper who typically has no rights to the now-flooded land on which she grew now-ruined crops thanks to a loan from an estate-owner, and who is now penniless, deeply in debt, and perhaps permanently excluded from the land.  That one of the biggest stories of the past decade could have been mostly blown off by television news and studiously ignored by the American public is a further demonstration that there is something profoundly wrong with corporate news-for-profit.  (The print press was better at covering the crisis, as was publically-supported radio, including the BBC and National Public Radio.)

In his speech on the withdrawal of designated combat units from Iraq last week, Barack Obama put Pakistan front and center in American security doctrine, “But we must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al-Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”  Even if Pakistan were not a major non-NATO ally of the United States, it is the world’s sixth most populous country and the 44th largest economy, according to the World Bank.  The flooding witnessed in the Indus Valley is unprecedented in the country’s modern history and was caused by a combination of increasingly warm ocean water and a mysterious blockage of the jet stream, which drew warm, water-laden air north to Pakistan, over which it burst in sheets of raging liquid.  If the floods that followed prove a harbinger of things to come, then they are a milestone in our experience of global warming, a big story in its own right.

News junkies who watch a lot of television broadcasts could not help but notice with puzzlement that as the cosmic catastrophe unfolded in Pakistan, it was nearly invisible on American networks.  I did a LexisNexis search for the terms “Pakistan” and “flood” in broadcast transcripts (covering mostly American networks) from July 31st to September 4th, and it returned only about 1,100 hits.  A search for the name of troubled actress Lindsay Lohan returned 653 search results in the same period and one for “Iraq,” more than 3,000 hits (the most the search engine will count).  A search for “mosque" and "New York” yielded 1,300 hits.  Put another way, the American media, whipped into an artificial frenzy by anti-Muslim bigots like New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and GOP hatemonger Newt Gingrich, were far more interested in the possible construction of a Muslim-owned interfaith community center two long blocks from the old World Trade Center site than in the sight of millions of hapless Pakistani flood victims.  

Of course, some television correspondents did good work trying to cover the calamity, including CNN’s Reza Sayah and Sanjay Gupta, but they generally got limited air time and poor time slots. (Gupta’s special report on the Pakistan floods aired the evening of September 5th, the Sunday before Labor Day, not exactly a time when most viewers might be expected to watch hard news.)  As for the global warming angle, it was not completely ignored.  On August 13th, reporter Dan Harris interviewed NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show at 7:45 am.  The subject was whether global warming could be the likely cause for the Pakistan floods and other extreme weather events of the summer, with Schmidt pointing out that such weather-driven cataclysms are going to become more common later in the twenty-first century.   Becky Anderson at CNN did a similar segment at 4 pm on August 16th.  My own search of news transcripts suggests that that was about it for commercial television.

The “Worst Disaster” TV Didn’t Cover

It’s worth reviewing the events that most Americans hardly know happened:

The deluge began on July 31st, when heavier than usual monsoon rains caused mudslides in the northwest of Pakistan.  Within two days, the rapidly rising waters had already killed 800 people.  On August 2nd, the United Nations announced that about a million people had been driven from their homes. Among the affected areas was the Swat Valley, already suffering from large numbers of refugees and significant damage from an army offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in the spring-summer of 2009. In the district of Dera Ismail Khan alone, hundreds of villages were destroyed by the floods, forcing shelterless villagers to sleep on nearby raised highways.

The suddenly homeless waited in vain for the government to begin to deliver aid, as public criticism of President Asaf Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani surged.  President Zardari’s opulent trip to France and Britain (during which he visited his chateau in Normandy) at this moment of national crisis was pilloried.  On August 8th in Birmingham, England, a furious Pakistani-British man threw both his shoes at him, repeating a famously humiliating incident in which an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President George W. Bush.  Fearing the response in Pakistan, the president’s Pakistan People’s Party attempted to censor the video of the incident, and media offices in that country were closed down or sometimes violently attacked if they insisted on covering it.  Few or no American broadcast outlets appear to have so much as mentioned the incident, though it pointed to the increasing dissatisfaction of Pakistanis with their elected government.  (The army has gotten better marks for its efficient aid work, raising fears that some ambitious officers could try to parlay a newfound popularity into yet another in the country’s history of military coups.) 

By August 5th, the floods had taken an estimated 1,600 lives, though some aid officials complained (and would continue to do so) that the death toll was far larger than reported.  Unlike the Haitian earthquake or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, this still building and far more expansive disaster was initially greeted by the world community with a yawn.   The following day, the government evacuated another half-million people as the waters headed toward southern Punjab.  At that point, some 12 million Pakistanis had been adversely affected in some way.  On August 7th, as the waters advanced on the southernmost province, Sindh, through some of the country’s richest farmlands just before harvest time, another million people were evacuated.  Prime Minister Gilani finally paid his first visit to some of the flood-stricken regions.

By August 9th, nearly 14 million people had been affected by the deluge, the likes of which had never been experienced in the region in modern history, and at least 20% of the country was under water.  At that point, in terms of its human impact, the catastrophe had already outstripped both the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.  On August 10th, the United Nations announced that six million Pakistanis needed immediate humanitarian aid just to stay alive. 

On August 14th, another half-million people were evacuated from the Sindhi city of Jacobabad.  By now, conspiracy theories were swirling inside Pakistan about landlords who had deliberately cut levees to force the waters away from their estates and into peasant villages, or about the possibility that the U.S. military had diverted the waters from its base at Jacobabad.  It was announced that 18 million Pakistanis had now been adversely affected by the floods, having been displaced, cut off from help by the waters, or having lost crops, farms, and other property.  The next day, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, surveying the damage, pronounced it was “the worst disaster” he had ever seen. 

The following week a second crest of river water hit Sindh Province.  On August 30th, it submerged the city of Sujawal (population 250,000).  The next day, however, there were a mere 16 mentions of Pakistan on all American television news broadcasts, mostly on CNN.  On Labor Day weekend, another major dam began to fail in Sindh and, by September 6th, several hundred thousand more people had to flee from Dadu district, with all but four districts in that rich agricultural province having seen at least some flooding. 

Today, almost six million Pakistanis are still homeless, and many have not so much as received tents for shelter.  In large swaths of the country, roads, bridges, crops, power plants -- everything that matters to the economy -- were inundated and damaged or simply swept away.  Even if the money proves to be available for repairs (and that remains an open question), it will take years to rebuild what was lost and, for many among those millions, the future will mean nothing but immiseration, illness, and death.

Why the Floods Weren’t News    

In the United States, the contrast with the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Haitian earthquake in January and the consequent outpouring of public donations was palpable.  Not only has the United Nations’ plea for $460 million in aid to cover the first three months of flood response still not been met, but in the past week donations seem to have dried up.  The U.S. government pledged $200 million (some diverted from an already planned aid program for Pakistan) and provided helicopter gunships to rescue cut-off refugees or ferry aid to them.

What of American civil society?  No rock concerts were organized to help Pakistani children sleeping on highways or in open fields infested with vermin.  No sports events offered receipts to aid victims at risk from cholera and other diseases.  It was as if the great Pakistani deluge were happening in another dimension, beyond the ken of Americans. 

A number of explanations have been offered for the lack of empathy, or even interest, not to speak of a visible American unwillingness to help millions of Pakistanis.  As a start, there were perfectly reasonable fears, even among Pakistani-Americans, that such aid money might simply be pocketed by corrupt government officials.  But was the Haitian government really so much more transparent and less corrupt than the Pakistani one? 

It has also been suggested that Americans suffer from donor fatigue, given the string of world disasters in recent years and the bad domestic economy.  On August 16th, for instance, Glenn Beck fulminated: “We can't keep spending. We are broke! Game over… no one is going to ride in to save you… You see the scene in Pakistan? People were waiting in line for aids [sic] from floods. And they were complaining, how come the aid is not here?  Look, when America is gone, who's going to save the people in Pakistan? See, we got to change this one, because we're the ones that always ride in to save people.” 

Still, the submerging of a fifth of a country the size of Pakistan is -- or at least should be -- a dramatic global event and even small sums, if aggregated, would matter.  (A dollar and a half from each American would have met the U.N. appeal.)  Some have suggested that the Islamophobia visible in the debate about the Park 51 Muslim-owned community center in lower Manhattan left Americans far less willing to donate to Muslim disaster victims.

And what of those national security arguments that nuclear-armed Pakistan is crucial not just to the American war in Afghanistan, but to the American way of life?  Ironically, the collapse of the neoconservative narrative about what it takes to make the planet’s “sole superpower” secure appears to have fallen on President Obama’s head.  One of the few themes he adopted wholeheartedly from the Bush administration has been the idea that a poor Asian country of 170 million halfway around the world, facing a challenge from a few thousand rural fundamentalists, is the key to the security of the United States. 

If the Pakistani floods reveal one thing, it’s that Americans now look on such explanations through increasingly jaundiced eyes.  At the moment, no matter whether it’s the Afghan War or those millions of desperate peasants and city dwellers in Pakistan, the public has largely decided to ignore the AfPak theater of operations.  It’s not so surprising.  Having seen the collapse of our financial system at the hands of corrupt financiers produce mass unemployment and mass mortgage foreclosures, they have evidently decided, as even Glenn Beck admits, it’s “game over” for imperial adventures abroad. 

Another explanation may also bear some weight here, though you won’t normally hear much about it.  Was the decision of the corporate media not to cover the Pakistan disaster intensively a major factor in the public apathy that followed, especially since so many Americans get their news from television? 

The lack of coverage needs to be explained, since corporate media usually love apolitical, weather-induced disasters.  But covering a flood in a distant Asian country is, for television, expensive and logistically challenging, which in these tough economic times may have influenced programming decisions.  Obviously, there is as well a tendency in capitalist news to cover what will attract advertising dollars.  Add to this the fact that, unlike the Iraq “withdrawal” story or the “mosque at Ground Zero” controversy, the disaster in Pakistan was not a political football between the GOP and the Democratic Party.  What if, in fact, Americans missed this calamity mostly because a bad news story set in a little-known South Asian country filled with Muslim peasants is not exactly “Desperate Housewives” and couldn’t hope to sell tampons, deodorant, or Cialis, or because it did not play into domestic partisan politics?   

The great Pakistani deluge did not exist, it seems, because it was not on television, would not have delivered audiences to products, and was not all about us.  As we saw on September 11, 2001, and again in March 2003, however, the failure of our electronic media to inform the public about centrally important global developments is itself a security threat to the republic.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.  His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website. You can catch him discussing flooded Pakistan on the latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

Copyright 2010 Juan Cole

Arnold Johann Kaspar Hottinger - 12.09.2010 13:49

Lieber Herr Kollege. Ich vermisse an dieser Analyse der Presse Krise den Faktor "Inserate". Als ich noch klein war, versicherten mir die erfahrenen Redaktoren der NZZ, das Blatt lebe im wesentlichen von seinen Inseraten. Es gab anscheinend sogar eine Regel (in jenen Zeiten des Wachstums),"wenn wir wieder eine Seite mehr Inserate haben, können wir auch eine weitere Seite Text publizieren". Auch was ich sonst über die Schwierigkeiten der Presse lese, spricht immer vom Inseratenschwund. Ist dieser nicht viel einschneidender als der - wohl auch existierende Rückgang von Abbonnenten?

Wenn ja, woher kommt er? Vielleicht muss man viele Gründe sehen. Etwa die Wirtschaftskrise (aber sollte die nicht auch Verkaufsbemühungen i.e. Inserate fördern?) Mir scheint gewiss : im Reklamewesen ist das Fernsehen eine gewichtige Konkurrenz. Viele Insertoren ziehen dieses Medium vor. - Warum? auch wieder viele Gründe, aber der wichtigste ist gewiss: Einschaltquoten. Wie aber kommen die hohen Einschaltquoten zustande? Indem die entsprechenden Redaktoren sich Themen suchen, die Massenzuschauer anziehen. Wir kennn alle solche: sexy sollte es sein, aber auch etwas das die Gewaltinstinkte kitzelt, cool, aber auch sensationell; generell Information nur in homeopathischen Dosen (jedoch wenn überhaupt so, dass die Leute glauben, nun seien sie "informiert"), dafür viel anspruchslose Unterhaltung.. Nicht alle Fernsehen sind gleich. Generell gilt wohl, Staatsfernsehen haben Staatsgelder aber auch einige Auflagen in Bezug auf die Programmation, kommerzielle Fernsehmedien sind darauf angewiesen und gehen oft auch systhematisch darauf aus, Geld zu machen, also Einschaltquoten und nichts anderes..Dies bedeutet aber auch, dass die subventionierten F.s unter dem Druck der kommerziellen F.s stehen, ganz ohne Einschaltquoten können sie ja auch nicht existieren, deshalb müssen sie ihr Programm auch immer etwas auf die Massenunterhaltung hin ausrichten.. Was in den USA geschieht, ist für uns oft symptomatisch, so 10 Jahre später kommt es auch bei uns an. D.h. unsere Medienlandschaft zeigt eine Anfälligkeit, so zu werden, wie wir die USA Landschaft kennen. Für mich keine gute Aussicht. Die Geldmacherei und das Ringen um Einschaltquoten führt dann auch zur politischen Instrumentalisierung. Eine Möglichkeit, Geld zu machen, ist, sich politischen Ausrichtungen zu verkaufen und von diesen direkt oder indirekt, offen oder heimlich, subventionieren zu lassen.z.B. Fox Television.Auch schon z.B. Weltwoche? Die London Times wurde von Murdoch gekauft. Sie ist seither murdochisch. Für echte, das heisst nicht murdochisch gelenkte , Information braucht man sie nicht mehr zu lesen. Ich erinnere mich auch an einen lesbaren Corriere de la Sera und einen Informativen Le Monde.. Heute ziehe ich das Internet weitaus vor. Facit für mich: die Schuldigen sind Infotainment und Politdemagogie, das Hauptinstrument dafür heisst TV. Was man - individuell- machen kann? nie mehr TV anschauen. Lieber Zeit fürs Internet verwenden..

andreas - 11.09.2010 23:42

Ich freu mich über jedes Projekt, welches Qualitätsmedienarbeit wiederbeleben will, ich wünsche mir und ihnen, dass dies gelingen möge.

Ueber das einseite Schuldabladen bei Onlineangeboten freu ich mich weniger. Die Onlineangebote der hiesigen Printhäuser haben mit Qualität wenig zu tun, aber viel mit Geschwindigkeit. Ich werde niemals auf Gratis"zeitungen" umsteigen, zumindest solange nicht, wie diese in der Art daher kommen, wie sie dies heute tun. Allerdings stellen diese eine grosse Konkurenz für die Werbeabteilungen der ernstzunehmenderen Printprodukte dar...

Da lobe ich mir die kontroversen Blogs und Newsfeeds unabhängiger Seiten, die durch ihre unabhängige Sichtweise und die fehlende Schere im Kopf einen echte Mehrwert in der Medienwelt darstellen. Der Anspruch ist dabei natürlich nicht identisch jenem einer gut ausgestatten Redaktion, welche vertiefte Abklärungen treffen kann, und soll, in der Folge einem höheren Objektivitätsanspruch gerecht werden muss.

Und zu guter Letzt, wobei gut..., die Berichtstiefe und der Umfang der sogennannten Qualitätspresse nimmt jedes halbe Jahr vermerklich ab. Es stellt sich durchaus die Frage, ob man denn für die schmalbrüstige NZZ der heutigen Tage den aktuellen Preis zu zahlen bereit ist. Für die NZZ von ehedem allenfalls acuh mehr, aber für das Abbauprodukt aktuell wirds langsam grenzwertig.

Karen Heidl - 11.09.2010 13:10

Sehr geehrter Herr Meier,

der Begriff Qualitätsjournalismus wird gerade im Zusammenhang mit aktuellen Diskussionen über unklare Refinanzierungsmodelle für unabhängigen Journalismus gerne überstrapaziert. Fakt ist doch, dass wir seit 15 Jahren in den Medien diese Entwicklungen vorausgesehen haben. Technologisch haben sie viele Medienhäuser sehr lange ausgesessen und viele Redakteure haben noch immer nur eine grobe Vorstellung von Online-Journalismus. Dass dies nicht der Billigjournalismus sein kann, der häufig dem so genannten Qualitätsjournalismus entgegengestellt wird, hätte den Medienmachern auch bereits vor 10 Jahren auffallen können, als bereits hohe Reichweiten mit Nachrichten, die schnell und günstig aus dem Internet zusammenrecherchiert worden sind, erzielt wurden. Sie haben Recht: Es gibt gute Beispiele für glaubwürdigen Online-Journalismus, medienadäquates Handwerk und Eigeninitiativen von Journalisten, die es nicht nötig haben, sich hinter die Schutzwälle traditioneller Wertschöpfungsmodelle zurückzuziehen. In diesem Sinne wünsche ich Ihnen viel Erfolg, Freude und gute Erfahrungen.

Gast - 11.09.2010 11:02

Bravo schöne Sonntagsrede! Jetzt aber gleich Klartext: 1. Leuenberger preist die Medienfreiheit, in wirklichkeit hat er in den letzten 16 Jahren diese ehrer eingeschränkt oder gar verteufelt (wie hier in seinem ARTIKEL). 2. Heiner Hug schreibt über den Prix Courage, aber keine Satz evt. darüber weshalb das Publikum des Beobachter z.B. nicht diesen Autisten gewählt hat sondern diese Controllerinen. Mal schauen ob das schweizer TV den Mut hat diese beiden Frauen für den Preis Schweizerinnen des Jahres vorzuschlagen? 3. A. Hottinger ist immer noch der Gleiche. Er schreibt irgendwas über den 11.09.01 dann etwas über Busch den Irak Afganistan und dann Bin Laden. Der Schluss ist einfach. Bush ist an allem schuld, weil er den Krieg gegen Afganistan geführt hat! Was hätte denn der gute Mann tun sollen? Bin Laden den nächsten Anschlag vorbereiten lassen? Bush wäre doch dann dagestanden mit abgesägten Hosen. Der Irakkrieg ist etwas anderes, da hat Bush teilweise aus persöndlichen Gründen (" Sadam ist der Man der meinen Dad töten wollte") die US-Armee überstrapaziert. Doch das Sadam Husein und die Taliban auch immer wieder tausende von Leuten umgebracht hatten und hätten wird nicht beachtet.

Kurz und Gut, dieses Portal hat meine erwartungen nach ca. 4 Artikeln voll und ganz erfüllt. Links und von unnötigen Ex-Journalisten geführt, für die ich kein Franken bezahlen würde, da die schon in den 80igern und 90igern nicht auf der Höhe waren. Die sollen endlich Rosenzüchten! Und solange ich 20 Minuten gratis lesen kann, und über 400 Fr. jährlich TV und Radiozwangsabgaben bezahlen darf, solange werde ich auch für diese Portal nicht bezahlen! Die einzige Zeitschrift für die ich bezahlen würde ist die Weltwoche denn dort giebt es neue Ein- und Ansichten und auch ein paar wirkliche Neuigkeiten (z.B. besser recherchierte Portaits über die Bundesratskandidaten). Vieleicht tritt ja Urs Paul Engeler nach seiner Pensionierung diesem Portal bei? Dann wäre es auch lesenswert!