Who

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

One of the first axioms American reporters learn is that a fender bender on Main Street is bigger news than a train wreck in Pakistan. Just as Tip O'Neill crystallized electoral wisdom in his dictum "All politics is local," many editors seem to have concluded that all journalism should be local too. Reportage from distant places tends to be limited to the melodramatic and gauged by personal relevance: either the it-could-have-been-me human-interest factor or the larger-implications factor of how, although the news consumer was untouched by a particular event, similar ones in the future might have greater impact.

U.S. press coverage of two recent plane crashes provides a striking example of this phenomenon. Each accident had larger implications for the general safety of air travel. After a USAir jet plunged into New York City's East River on takeoff from LaGuardia Airport with a highly inexperienced crew at the controls, both pilot and co-pilot failed to make themselves available in timely fashion for drug and alcohol tests. When a French UTA jet exploded in midair after taking off from the African nation of Chad, investigators found evidence of a terrorist bomb, allegedly linked to Middle East events.

If the crashes were comparable as cautionary tales, they differed sharply in severity. The LaGuardia accident resulted in two deaths and seven hospital admissions. The Chad mishap killed all 171 people on board. Yet in the week following the two crashes, the Washington Post ran an identical number of stories, five, about each. The Los Angeles Times published almost twice as many stories about the New York City crash (ten) as the one in Chad (six). In the New York Times, the LaGuardia crash rated twelve stories, the Chad disaster six. The networks reacted similarly: ABC's Nightline, for example, aired three cut-in reports and, later, a full show about the LaGuardia accident but nothing about the Chad crash. (TIME ran three paragraphs on the French airliner and two on the American plane.)

To be fair, there were logistical reasons for the disparity. The USAir accident took place only a taxi ride away from the headquarters of the three networks and many other news organizations -- indeed, a CBS News producer was in the plane when it crashed and filed a report from the wreckage -- while the remains of the UTA airliner were scattered over 40 sq. mi. of remote desert. The LaGuardia crash offered both the surefire appeal of a happy ending for most passengers and a host of survivors available for interviews. The apparent cause of the USAir crash was quickly identified as pilot error, while befuddling doubts lingered about who bombed the UTA plane and why.

Even so, the relative handling of the stories amounts to a blatant rejection of the poetic notion that each time the bell of doom tolls, it tolls for all mankind. The collective news judgment seems to be that each death diminishes the reader in direct proportion to the shared bonds of nationality, ethnicity, religion, type of government and the like. Pointing out this callous calculus seems to do nothing to mitigate it. As Columbia University professor Herbert Gans noted in his 1980 study Deciding What's News, network journalists in the 1960s tried to prick their bosses' consciences by assembling "a Racial Equivalence Scale, showing the minimum number of people who had to die in airline crashes in different countries before the crash became newsworthy . . . One hundred Czechs were equal to 43 Frenchmen, and the Paraguayans were at the bottom." Such bias seems widespread. Fleet Street reporters have traditionally voiced, in a blatantly racist and jingoist phrase, the equivalence of "1,000 Wogs, 50 Frogs and one Briton."

The disproportion seems to be based on economic as well as ethnic factors. Air crashes, which entail millions of dollars in losses and mainly affect the affluent middle class, especially outside the U.S., command far more coverage than less glamorous causes of violent death. On the same day that the New York Times was giving front-page play to both air accidents last month, it carried three paragraphs at the bottom of an inside page about rebel action in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed twelve people and wounded 17. Also in the crash aftermath, an alleged coup attempt in Burkina Faso that led to the execution of the second and third highest officers of government rated two paragraphs. Murders of Vietnamese settlers in Cambodia were cited in part of one paragraph in a more general story. That was in the Times, which excels in foreign coverage: in many other newspapers the events went completely unnoted.

. Some foreign violence does get substantial U.S. media coverage. But typically this is because American corporate or other interests are directly involved -- as when Union Carbide's poison gas cloud killed 2,233 people in Bhopal, India, in 1984 -- or because humanitarian groups arouse American donors and volunteers, as happened with famines in Ethiopia and Biafra. In general, however, the scales are so tilted that Hurricane Hugo, which killed 51 people, got about as much coverage across the U.S. as the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that claimed 20,000 lives.

Is a moral issue involved here? Or is this simply a reflection of a pragmatic attempt by editors to echo the values and interests of their readers? And does it really make a difference whether Americans know about disasters elsewhere? It certainly does when it comes to amassing donations or building a congressional coalition for emergency relief. It also matters in a less material way because every social contract, from the tribe to the United Nations, is based on recognizing common human bonds. Whether the fault lies with news consumers or with editors who pander to them, the bell ought to toll equally for thee, and thee, and thee.