Who cares about distant Zimbabwe?
February 4, 2009
By Marty Kaplan
IT’S no contest. Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s corruption is way more entertaining than Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s.
A mother having in vitro octuplets on top of six prior in vitro kids is much more attention-grabbing than a massive famine and cholera epidemic half a world away. The $1.22 million that ousted Merrill Lynch head John Thain spent redecorating his office provokes far more American outrage than the $7.3 million from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria that was confiscated by Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank.
It makes perfect sense that network news obsesses about Florida tot Caylee Anthony’s disappearance and death. Tease us with shocking tidbits about her indicted mother Casey, and we’ll patiently consume minute after minute of ads for mattresses and Malibu rehabs until the melodrama resumes. But billboard a story about Zimbabwe, and instantly we’re grabbing the clicker in search of something less alien to care about.
If you belong to the dwindling tribe of Americans who read national newspapers like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, you may have come across last week’s story about Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai agreeing to join Mugabe’s government after months of pressure. (If the Los Angeles Times is your paper, you may justifiably fear that the shoehorning of the California section into the A section means that both international and local news — competing for the same news hole — will suffer.)
If you read through all the inches of the latest dispatch from Zimbabwe, you may have learned that Mugabe stole last year’s presidential election; that the annual inflation rate in Zimbabwe has reached 516 quintillian percent; and that seven of that country’s 12 million people risk starving in the next two months.
I have to confess that I didn’t read any of those stories, in print or online. There’s only so much time in a day, and the onslaught of information clamoring for our attention inevitably requires some kind of triage. Domestic politics? Check. But Somalia? Sudan? Not so much.
The only reason I googled up those articles about Zimbabwe was a few horrifying seconds of BBC News I happened to catch in the car last week, on the public radio program “The World,” about the United Nations World Food Program having to cut in half the already inadequate monthly rations it provides that country. It takes about 36 pounds of corn a month to keep an adult alive. But now, because of donor shortfalls (the United States and Europe are unwilling to lift sanctions, including famine aid, on Mugabe), the World Food Program is being forced to reduce its rations to 11 pounds of corn per person per month. They only way someone can survive on that is to scavenge enough wild fruit to stave off malnutrition and disease. Seven million people could die by April.
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asked the Creator. Are Zimbabweans our brothers and sisters? Of course. So are the women raped and mutilated in Darfur, and the child soldiers conscripted in Congo. So are the political prisoners in Burma, Sri Lanka and China. So are the terrorized and the tortured, the wounded and the dead, in the Middle East and southwest Asia. And so are the tsunami victims of Malaysia and Thailand, the earthquake victims of Kashmir, the flood victims of Katrina.
Where do we draw the line? Said President-elect Obama, “Empathy strikes me as the most important quality that we need in America and around the world.” But if the American media relentlessly reported all the world’s miseries, surely compassion fatigue would set in among its consumers.
So the principles the press uses to select what global misfortunes to cover, like the principles that determine what disasters we audiences can absorb, come down to scale and similarity. The worst catastrophes, and the ones whose victims are most like us, generally get the most attention. To be sure, a crusading journalist, an enterprising news outlet or a heroic non-governmental organization can occasionally put a remote or untold story onto our radar screen. But by and large, we tend to hear about horrors too huge to ignore, and to care about people who are, one way or another, like ourselves.
This is not inherently shameful. It is likely a consequence of our hardwiring, our evolutionary instinct to protect our own gene pool. The task of civilization, then, and the responsibility of its wisdom traditions, including religion, is to expand the borders of our empathy beyond our ethnicity, to teach us to see the Other as our brother, and to recognize strangers as neighbors.
It would be nice if our news media – as a sign of our being civilized – shouldered a heftier share of that responsibility. But ever since news became a revenue center for conglomerates, rather than a public service for citizens, the calculus of what to cover has grown crueler. No advertiser will spend a hundred thousand dollars per second, as they did during the Super Bowl, to rent the eyeballs of people paying attention to news from Zimbabwe. But surely there also exists a moral currency that values the distribution of news like that at more than nothing; surely there also exists an attention economy that pegs the worth of consuming news like that not to dollars, but to decency.
(Martin Kaplan is research professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.)
Print This Article
Email This Article
Comments
9 Responses to “Who cares about distant Zimbabwe?”Advertisement
-
Zimbabwe News Sites
OPINION POLL
-
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.
OPINION POLL
-
Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.
Its some Zimbabweans who erroneously believe Zimbabwe is the centre of the universe. The fact is Zimbabwe is on the periphery, economically culturally, you name it.
MODERATOR: Well spoken, Bachinche. President Mugabe is in the forefront of those who believe that Zimbabwe is the centre of universal interest.
Translation?
What Martin is saying is, sadly, true and means one thing for every Zimbabwean: that if we think that we are a priority for the West, or anybody else for that matter, then we are fooling ourselves. Whatever cent the West will point our way will demand a far more disciplined and polite etiquette than Mugabe is exhibiting at the moment. You don’t insult the people with money; it’s a bad thing to do. The euphoria of the GNU ‘deal’ will die down soon and we will wake up to the reality of a global economy in recession, where countries like Iceland have declared bankruptcy and have turned, like many of our donors, to the IMF.
Africa is shouting hoarse for the West to release money to Zimbabwe, oblivious to the fact that some of the top corporations there, which have outsourced their production plant to Africa, Asia and South America because it is cheaper to produce there and ship or sell, are cutting back on their overseas portfolio in order to save jobs back home or simply because they are broke. The Obama administration came into power on the promise to roll back and not reward “the export of American jobs overseas”. At whose expense?
Soon, if not already, mines in Africa will close because people in the North are buying food with money they used to buy diamond rings for. Electronics companies that had invested heavily in SA, Botswana, and so forth will cut down. Translation? That’s where Zimbabwe’s southern African Diaspora works. One hopes that this won’t feed into xenophobia.
We would be expecting a bad situation if we had a functional government and a strong productive sector and sharp minds. But alas, we chased away our most intelligent minds like criminals, and our industry is now true only as a fable.
I am no pessimist, but I am a realist. If I see Americans losing homes and relying on state welfare, it’s not a good sign: these are the people who donate to charity so that the NGOs you see in rural Tsholotsho or Mudzi can bring your mother and father food and medicines to treat cholera and HIV/AIDS.
When they too are in the red, and yet your unelected president is hurling insults at their popular and elected government, the odds of getting any assistance compared to other, more polite countries are very heavy. It pays not to talk recklessly and to make demands and accusations, rather than behaving in a rabid manner that will starve your citizens.
So what if Zimbaweans think they are the center of the universe? Every other citizen of every other nation believes the same thing. Yes, the entire globe is going through a recession, but it’s not a full blown depression. Zimbabwe has the potential to become a jewel of southern Africa. The only thing keeping it back is a leader who is so corrupt that he only seems to care about himself.
To all Zimbabweans who are looking to the US for help right now, forget it. Unless it comes directly from the citzens, it won’t come. I have little faith in the “expert” that Obama is getting his advice from. She was Clinton’s Africa expert. We all know how well Clinton did in Africa.
I have been follwing the plight of Zimbabwe since July of last year. It breaks my heart that a country that has the potential to not only feed itself but it’s poorer neighbours as well can’t even survive. Combine that with anunchecked cholera epidemic and worthless currency…
At this point, even if Mugabe is removed from power can Zimbabwe recover?
I am a 65 year old grandmother that just returned from a stay at the Victoria Falls Hotel (solo). Zimbabwe is a beautiful country and I was saddened by situation that currently exists. The news reports have kept so many tourists away which only makes things worst. Everyone on the plane I arrived on was going on to Zambia and thought I was crazy to go to Zimbabwe alone. I had a fabulous time…treated great and hope to return soon…..so maybe the news reports are a double edged sword.
Mr Editor / Moderator
If you have Arthur ”Shut Up”Mutambara’s email address, could you kindly send him the two comments above by Clapperton and Bachinche as well as the original article by Kaplan. Arthur could be busy filling in forms to claim his per diem from the CIO to read these articles so a direct email could do him some good. What use is robot science if it can not confer on Mutambara the simple logic that it is not the ”job of America and Britain” to support Zimbabwe when their own citizens are losing their employment, homes and savings? But of course, when they do give you the assistance you so dearly need, they demand workable structures, transparency and accountability just as they are doing with the companies they are bailing out SO how can you tell them to shut up?
JERRYLEE VANDERHURST deserves a commendation from us the ordinary people of Zimbabwe for reminding the world Zimbabweans are a peace loving people and our welcome and treatment of visitors to our beautiful country is second to none. Its only when power hungry despots fight each other that our reputation is soiled, and other outside ‘travel guidence’ to avoid Zimbabwe portrays us as an unfriendly nation. Well done Jerrylee, bring friends and family next time.
I have every intention of returning with friends to Zimbabwe. Everyone that has enjoyed my photos has remarked what a beautiful country it is. I have stressed to everyone that despite the current situation the Zimbabaweans were gracious and kind at all times to the “solo American grandmother”. Everywhere I went people were friendly and were especially pleased that I was sporting an “Obama” baseball cap. The night of the inaguration of President Obama we had a “viewing party” with locals as well as people from many other countries and celebrated together. I told my family and friends “if I could not be on the podium with Obama there is no other place I would have rather been watching then in beautiful Zimbabwe” Only wish peace and happiness to all who live there.
Zimbabwe might not be in the center of the world – but some people outside do care.
It is enough to have come once to this country to fall in love – I backpacked Zim a few weeks, already some years ago, when it was a brilliant country. And it is just impossible for me to forget it. I would like to come back with my kids to show them this beautiful country and the lovely people who inhabit it. I really hope things will go to the better.
Zimbabwe’s worst enermy is the the Zimbabweans themselves especially those living the diaspora (overseas in particular). They never have anything possitve to say about their country yet there is so much. Mugabe is not Zimbabwe, the people are.