Reporting Variations

It’s interesting to compare the news coverage of the earthquake in Italy during the week with that of a stronger earthquake in Burma on the same day. Lots and lots of coverage of a Richter 6.2 quake in nearby Italy, which claimed around 300 lives. The one in Burma was R6.8, and only three people died in a country with a repressive regime a long way away. There was just a paragraph about the quake in Burma in my newspaper the next day – tagged on to the page about the Italian earthquake – and nothing at all in the BBC’s lunchtime news, which was still full of Olympics stuff.