Behind The Statistics
By Neil Dodds
26 July, 2006
30 to 40 people day every day in the current Israel-Lebanon conflict. In Iraq, the violence claims 100 lives every day. In the war in the Congo, it's over ten times that: An average day sees 1,200 lives lost in the conflict. So why does the news present the stories in the same running order as above? The BBC's editor's blog has some answers.
Craig Oliver, editor of the BBC's Ten O'Clock News, says that it's a question he worries about. Are some lives more valuable or more worthy of western media's attention than others?
However, there is a reasoning behind the running order, he says. The Congo war, a crisis he describes as "desperately important", has been running for decades and is one the broadcaster regularly returns to. The BBC also pays special attention to Iraq - "the Ten has led the way in attempting to show the scale of the violence in Iraq in recent months," he says, "we have regularly led the programme with stories from there, and the BBC is the only British broadcaster with a full time commitment to being there."
(Interesting, criticism that the Iraq war isn't getting the full attention of other broadcasters, including CNN, is published on Juan Antonio Giner's excellent blog).
Oliver says that the crisis in Lebanon merits more time because of its complexity: it "needs space" to provide context and analysis. It's also a crisis point for numerous other global stories - including the conflict in Iraq, the price of petrol, the war on terror... It's precisely because of the potential repercussions of the conflict that make it so important. He concludes that any people "fear the consequences" of this conflict and the BBC sees it as its job to help them understand a "scary world."
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