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Americans Taught: Foreign Deaths Are Not Important

Comment by Larry Ross, April 23, 2007

This article shows why the US news media treats 32 deaths at Virginia Tech as vitally important and newsworthy, but 200 killings in Iraq as of little importance.

There's a war on, people get killed every day, and people are used to it - editors think. So Americans have learned to accept foreign deaths as not particularly important. However, to Iraqis, Americans have become mass murderers - killing innocent men, women and children. And the majority of Americans do not lift a finger to stop it or even object. They regard it as a natural right to murder foreigners, for any lies their leader chooses to invent and give them. So long as the foreigners don't retaliate against Americans, they can treat Bush's murders as normal and of little interest. Congress, and most of the public, even approve allowing Bush to continue with his mass killings for at least another year. Probably in a year Congress will vote to extend that.

Iraqis mourn their dead just like Americans mourn the 32 murdered students at Virginia Tech. Why do Americans consider their dead as more important?

Partly it is it because the US media treat it that way, and Americans pick up this unexpressed message.

The business of a military-industrial-fascist-profit-driven 'democracy' is murder on a grand scale for any reason the leader supplies. Editors work hard to get people used to Bush's new twisted evil values. They suppress criticism and present the murders as normal, acceptable and 'as American as apple pie'.

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A Hierarchy of Death

Why do 32 deaths in Virginia receive blanket coverage while nearly 200 fatalities in Iraq are barely reported?

by Roy Greenslade, April 20, 2007

"The Guardian' -- 04/19/07 - Thirty-two die in American university shooting . Result? Huge media coverage in the US and Britain. In Iraq, almost 200 die, arguably the worst day of carnage in that beleaguered country since the coalition invasion. Result? Coverage so restrained as to be, in many cases, totally negligible. Could you even find it in the Times this morning? Why?

General reasons first. The media operate what amounts to a hierarchy of death. Here are the criteria: foreign deaths always rank below domestic deaths. Similarly, on the basis that all news is local, deaths at home provide human interest stories that people want to know about, while the deaths of foreigners are merely statistics.

Sure, the victims and their families are human beings, too, but if they are thousands of miles away they cannot - in the eyes of the media's editorial controllers - generate the same sympathy and interest as deaths near at hand.

Deaths in ongoing conflicts always receive less coverage than unexpected deaths elsewhere (because the latter are, by their nature, unpredictable and news values always rate new-ness above old-ness).

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