I turned on the TV in plenty of time to catch the final weather report on the noon news. CBC had the breaking story of the Mumbai blasts. CTV had a local fatal car crash. Global news had already finished. CityTV didn't seem to have anything either.
According to The Toronto Star, seven explosions "rocked Mumbai's commuter rail network during evening rush hour...as many as 100 people were feared killed." Mumbai is three times bigger than London or New York. Its trains are habitually packed. I cannot imagine with seven explosions that the final tally will remain that low. Plus there are scores of injured who will live this trauma well into the future, never mind have to recover from their physical injuries.
Yet there isn't the extensive television coverage of this tragedy that we saw last year and in 2001, and I didn't hear anything on the radio when I had it on during the noon hour (maybe listening to the wrong radio station? Still, they all had small blurbs on the other big explosion stories). Perhaps this lack of network coverage is because the police suspect Kashmiri militants, local-to-India terrorists, the kind who won't be looking our way so we don't need to worry over here.
The Internet really comes through in these kinds of stories where the MSM decides for us what we will be interested in and decides that we are interested only in the interrupted-program breaking-news kind of coverage when major happenings occur here, in the US, and the UK, and maybe Europe. Certainly not Asia, unless Anglos/Australians are involved. So if we want the whole story and didn't tune in at the precise right moment or don't have cable (CBC Newsworld is carrying the story apparently), we have to turn to online editions of MSM or other news outlets.
BBC and CBC have the most comprehensive, in context stories that I've seen so far, and BBC allows for local survivors to comment.
According to The Toronto Star, seven explosions "rocked Mumbai's commuter rail network during evening rush hour...as many as 100 people were feared killed." Mumbai is three times bigger than London or New York. Its trains are habitually packed. I cannot imagine with seven explosions that the final tally will remain that low. Plus there are scores of injured who will live this trauma well into the future, never mind have to recover from their physical injuries.
Yet there isn't the extensive television coverage of this tragedy that we saw last year and in 2001, and I didn't hear anything on the radio when I had it on during the noon hour (maybe listening to the wrong radio station? Still, they all had small blurbs on the other big explosion stories). Perhaps this lack of network coverage is because the police suspect Kashmiri militants, local-to-India terrorists, the kind who won't be looking our way so we don't need to worry over here.
The Internet really comes through in these kinds of stories where the MSM decides for us what we will be interested in and decides that we are interested only in the interrupted-program breaking-news kind of coverage when major happenings occur here, in the US, and the UK, and maybe Europe. Certainly not Asia, unless Anglos/Australians are involved. So if we want the whole story and didn't tune in at the precise right moment or don't have cable (CBC Newsworld is carrying the story apparently), we have to turn to online editions of MSM or other news outlets.
BBC and CBC have the most comprehensive, in context stories that I've seen so far, and BBC allows for local survivors to comment.
Comments