A balanced and generally favourable account by Tom Gross in the Jerusalem Post on the coverage of last week's Holocaust Day finds much to applaud in it -- apart from the Arab press, which ignored it, and a couple of lapses by the Guardian.

Gross compares this with the omissions in the coverage of the Holocaust itself, particularly by the New York Times, which played down the Nazi genocide by publishing only brief reports which it buried inside the paper. Gross observes:

'The Times has never properly acknowledged its failings in this matter. And the fact that a comparable mind-set still seems to dominate the paper continues to have consequences – whether in the unfair coverage it gives Israel or the relative lack of attention given to other genocides and systematic acts of inhumanity, such as those in North Korea or Burma, and in particular those for which Arabs are largely responsible, as in Darfur. The tsunami tragedies can occupy the front page for days on end, but Darfur is lucky if it makes an inside page once in a week'.

The NYT is surely far from alone in this. Before Darfur, the Sudan genocide which had been going on for some two decades had been all but ignored by most of the media. The prevailing attitude seems to be that this kind of behaviour goes on all the time in the third world so requires little comment -- in other words, that human life there is of less value than in the west. The fact that this is patently a racist attitude does not, of course, occur to the western 'liberals' who profess it. The result is that barbarism in the developing world is ignored by western media which, by concentrating disproportionately on abuses by its own side, sanitises and even excuses the world's greatest horrors and abandons their multitudinous victims.

Posted by melanie at February 4, 2005