More than two months after the April 15th Boston Marathon bombings, news stories about the attack continue to pour in. Here’s a sampling of mid-June headlines: “FBI Knew Earlier of Boston Bombing Suspect”; “Boston Bombing Victim Found Out She Was Pregnant After Rushed To Emergency Room”; “National Football League Bans Purses after Boston Bombing.”
As someone born and raised in the Greater Boston area, I was shocked and saddened by the death and destruction that descended upon the city that April day. But the media blitz, and the increasingly desperate pursuit of eye-catching headlines, reveals less about the tragic event and more about the questionable priorities of Western news reporting. The mainstream media’s skewed views are particularly apparent when the Boston attack is portrayed as just one of a quartet of violent April events: two bomb blasts and two horrific industrial accidents, one of each in the United States, and one of each in South Asia. Joining the Boston blasts in this gloomy month were an industrial explosion in the U.S. (April 17, at a fertilizer plant in the small town of West in the state of Texas), a small bomb blast in Bangalore (also April 17, near a BJP state office), and the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh (April 24, in the Greater Dhaka area).
Juxtaposing the media coverage of these four events brings out two important contrasts: terrorism vs. industrial malfeasance, and the “developed” world vs. the “developing” world. Each event can be compared to each other one, creating a complex – and telling – matrix of analysis.
Comparing the two US events, the bomb blast in a large Northeastern city was big news (tied to sexy topics like Islamic extremism and international terrorist plots), almost entirely eclipsing the coverage of the more deadly “accident” in a rural Southern area. Just looking at the figures, this is surprising, as the Texas explosion killed more people and destroyed more of the surrounding area. But perhaps the inattention to Texas is not so strange after all: why would mainstream media sources – with their deep ties to multinational industries and corporate conglomerations – betray their industrial brethren by shedding too much light on their shortcomings?
The level of industrial malfeasance at the Texas plant is staggering. The labour reporter Mike Elk sums up the damning evidence in a Washington Post column, one of the rare mainstream media explorations of the factory’s epic non-compliance. Elk’s article deserves to be quoted at length: “The plant had 1,350 times the legally allowed amount of highly explosive ammonium nitrate, yet hadn’t informed the Department of Homeland Security of the danger… Not only had the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) not inspected the plant since 1985 but also, because of underfunding, OSHA can inspect plants like the one in West on average only once every 129 years.” Elk also points out the absurdity of focusing on terrorism at the expense of industrial malfeasance: “In 2011, 4,609 Americans were killed in workplace accidents while only 17 Americans died at the hands of terrorists — about the same number as were crushed to death by their televisions or furniture.”
“Juxtaposing the media coverage of these four events brings out two important contrasts: terrorism vs. industrial malfeasance, and the “developed” world vs. the “developing” world.”
While Western media sources put all their focus on the threat of terrorism in America, ignoring corporate negligence, they took the exact opposite approach when covering the two South Asian events. The Bangalore blast does not even make it to the proper New York Times website, being relegated instead to its “India Ink” blog, where the biggest piece of news is that these bombs were not related to the Boston blasts. Meanwhile the Bangladesh collapse received breathless coverage from Western news sources, with reporters and columnists dipping into their stockpile of clichés about the “corrupt,” “struggling,” “laxly regulated” country.
Certainly, the collapse in Bangladesh was on a much greater scale than the Bangalore bombing, but this cannot fully explain the media’s divergent responses. Bomb blasts within India – especially those that don’t target foreigners – are not cause for excessive concern in the Western press. This line of thinking seems to imply that terrorists originate from over there (geography was never a strong suit of typical Western reporting), so why make a big deal out of it when a bomb or two goes off in that neck of the woods? Meanwhile, even if the Boston bombers were white permanent residents, and educated extensively in the United States, their religious identity and place of birth made them irredeemably foreign.
A similar double standard is put in place in the reporting of the Texas and Bangladesh industrial mishaps. In Texas, it was just an accident, and clearly not the result of decades of deregulation and open defiance of government oversight; in Bangladesh, it was a clear act of criminal negligence, and the country’s leaders should be ashamed.
Even observers who were slightly more sensitive fell into the double-standard trap. A New York Times op-ed by the novelist M. T. Anderson compared the Bangladesh collapse to similar garment factory disasters in the nineteenth-century United States, noting that companies will move around the world to avoid regulations. But by only citing centuries-old American cases, the op-ed creates the impression that the era of industrial accidents and the savage exploitation of labour is over in the “developed” world. The op-ed goes on to suggest that the solution to this problem is more ethical consumption by Western buyers, who should put pressure on clothing companies to source their garments more carefully. But such a naïve suggestion totally ignores the nature and force of the present-day, aggressively globalized capitalist system, which skillfully caters to tiny, niche “ethical” markets (fair trade, organic, etc.), while finds further ways to subvert labour laws and move operations to countries that put up the least resistance.
It’s reassuring that the garment workers in Bangladesh have something quite different in mind from M. T. Anderson’s voluntaristic, consumerist nonsense. Soon after the factory’s collapse, workers demanded the arrest of the factory owner, and their demand was met, despite the owner’s ties to the country’s ruling political party. On May Day, thousands of workers took to the street in protest, demanding safer working conditions and higher wages. Maybe people in Texas and across the United States can take a cue from their less “developed,” but clearly more aware counterparts.
