An examination of the nature of US tsunami relief aid and the reasons for the differences in US corporate news coverage of wars and natural disasters.
Even without natural disaster millions of children die every year from starvation or from diseases caused by the lack of clean drinking water. It would take only a small portion of the Pentagon's annual budget to provide safe drinking water to the population of the Third World. Enough food is produced in the world each year to feed everyone if poor people had the money to buy it. The answer to this problem is the abolition of the capitalist economic system and the further enrichment of the US ruling class at the expense of poor people here and abroad. However, the Pentagon's mission is the exact opposite of that. The Pentagon wants to perpetuate capitalism and enable even greater exploitation of Third Word people by American capitalists.
The US corporate media's reaction to the tsunami disaster in Asia is also very revealing as to their real objectives. An estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed so far in the war in Iraq. However, one does not see pictures of the destroyed houses, the corpses in the rubble and the wounded children crying for their parents in Iraq as one can easily see pictures of the victims of the tsunami hour after hour on all corporate television news channels. A saying of the corporate news media is that if it bleeds, it leads, but it bleeds a lot in Iraq and is almost totally ignored. Why is this? The answer is that there is a big difference between natural disasters and wars. There is little blame or criticism which can be leveled at those who own and dominate American society and their servants in government from natural disasters or so-called acts of God. However, wars are an entirely different matter. Wars are the deliberate actions of governments and can be prevented or stopped once they occur. Also, wars are extremely profitable for some corporations and many of these corporations own the US media. It could be very disadvantageous to the popularity of these wars among the American people if ugly images of corpses or crying children filled American television screens every night. Therefore, even though the casualty figures may be similar, there occurs the tremendous divergence in corporate news coverage of wars and natural calamities. This duplicity by the US corporate media adds significant evidence to the contention that they are not free and independent observers of the world situation, but are instead intimate collaborators with the US government in their illegal, immoral wars and designs for empire.
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