Hurricane Matthew: In Haiti the death toll stands at 877 but the US media does not seem to care

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hurricane-matthew-in-haiti-the-death-toll-stands-at-842-but-the-us-media-does-not-seem-to-care-a7351236.html?cmpid=facebook-post

Four minutes before 10am on Friday morning, the Reuters news agency provided an update on the death toll in Haiti. At a minimum, the news agency said, 572 people had lost their lives as a result of Hurricane Matthew.

At almost precisely the same time, CNN was broadcasting live footage of the storm as it passed northwest along the coast of Florida, from where more than 2m people had fled. The winds were strong, the waves powerful and there was genuine concern about the potentially deadly impact of the storm surge.

But at that moment, the number of US fatalities as a result of the category four storm was zero. The Haitian death toll barely made a mention in the network’s rolling coverage.

Should we even still be surprised by any of this. Have we not grown cold and cynical. Do we not all know that the media values some lives more than others. Have we forgotten the anecdote from one British newsroom that “one dead in Putney equals ten dead in Paris equals one hundred dead in Turkey”, etc?

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