OJ,

You are right about the coverage aspect I think.
I know that flooding of the Yellow River in China has had massive death tolls a number of times, there was a flood in the 1600's that killed an estimated 300,000 people and the the 1917 and 1938 floods allegedly killed around 1,000,000 people (although you might not count the 1938 flood as it was man-made). These events were far worse than the recent tsunami but lacked the coverage.

This is not to minimize the current situation but to put it in context. Too many people who should know better think history began with the advent of television.

Forget natural disasters - imagine if FOX and CNN had covered Rwanda in April 1994.

Hmmm, nothing would have changed. Except perhaps for some film of the UN officers pleading with Kofi to do something, anything to help the victims.

Jim: If it had been on television, we would have sent troops.

I made that point last week, when the Archbishop of Canterbury started voicing doubts about the existance of a deity and the meaning of life in the wake of the tsunami. Since Rev. Williams was very much alive at the time of the 1976 earthquake in China, his meditation comes off more as an intellectual exercise done mainly because of the public's greater access to images of death, rather than just the deaths themselves. Fortunately, greater media access to scenes of distruction today also goes hand-in-hand with greater ability to get relief efforts to those locations, just so long as a certain political party doesn't try to cut the deployment budget of the United States military again.

(Of course, given the timing of the China quake, right at the end of Mao's reign and during the battle with the "Gang of Four" among the Chinses leadership, even if the technology had been available in 1976, the government would have been in denial that the quake's toll was anywhere near that high, less is show the communist government in an unfavorable light. See the Soviet Union and Chernobyl a decade later for another example of that kind of thinking.)

We sent troops to Somalia in response to pictures when the calls to "do something" became loud enough. What the pictures didn't tell us was that it was politically caused starvation and not truly a natural disaster.

Could the fact that the tsunami claimed the lives of thousands of Western tourists have anything to do with the hype?

The week before the Sumatra disaster, there were floods in the Philippines that destroyed whole villages, with a death toll somewhere in the tens of thousands.

I haven't seen any blogging on that, nobody is writing essays about god's attitude toward monsoons, and Amazon isn't collecting money for the survivors.

The international attention to 150,000 dead is, I feel certain, due largely to improved communications; there was not this kind of attention when similar (or larger) numbers of Bangladeshis were drowned.

Orrin might wish to remind us that the Lindberghs flew over the Yellow River floods in 1938 and did a good deal to mobilize outside attempts at succor.