In the wake of the Boston bombings, many people have commented,
often angrily, that these sorts of things happen constantly in many parts of
the world yet receive no media coverage. The implication is that we are biased
in some way. But maybe it’s something else.
America is often considered the world’s most advanced nation. They have a very well established and robust liberal democratic institutional framework. Their popular culture is imperialist and still inspires hundreds of thousands of migrants and would-be migrants every year. They are the richest nation on earth. They are the most powerful nation on earth. They are arguably the most successful nation on earth.
America is often considered a role model for other
countries. Many people think that America represents a level of development and
a way of life that is worth imitating. This is true of many Australians despite
our more entrenched links with Britain.
So when something like the bombing of a large community
event occurs in the United States we take notice. This place is supposedly the
Promised Land, and yet it appears to have problems. We want to know what
happened, why, and who was responsible. We wonder if it was a terrorist attack
or if it was home grown, because that has implications for our vision of
America as bastion of global liberty or unequal breeding ground of discontent.
We also pay attention because even in America, where levels
of violence are unusually high for a developed country, such events are rare.
Bomb blasts in Afghanistan are not rare. Therefore they are not news. Certainly
there could be more coverage of the overall situation in such places, or
analysis of trends in bomb blasts, but simply reporting every explosion as it
occurs would be boring and tedious.
This does not reflect a lack of concern for places like
Afghanistan; perhaps quite the opposite. America went into Afghanistan with a
plan to make it more like America. If things are going really bad in America
then that policy seems hypocritical. If we generally support America and its
liberty imperialism to any extent then we are perfectly normal for being more
fascinated by explosions in America than in Afghanistan or other hotbeds of
unrest.
Some of the news coverage has been exceedingly banal. For
example, a blow by commentary of what ASIO did when they got word of the Boston
blast. But by and large there is nothing wrong with being more interested in
American explosions than other ones.
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