If it happens in the United States and it makes good television, then it must be the big news story of the day, writes Shane Hegarty
You mightn't have noticed it, but there was a tragedy this week in which lives were buried under earth, and a locality traumatised, but it didn't happen in West Virginia.
On the same day that the coal miners were trapped underground, and while the world's media joined distraught families at the surface, an Indonesian village was buried by a massive landslide triggered by torrential rain. More than 100 people may have died in Cijeruk, on Java, when a hillside collapsed early on Wednesday morning and buried 100 houses, adding to the dozens killed in flash flooding in the east of the island. Desperate rescuers dug through mud with their bare hands in a search for survivors. Among the many bodies recovered was a woman clinging on to her child.
A heartbreaking story? Not heartbreaking enough for much of the western media. It appears that the disaster would have to take far more than a couple of hundred Indonesian lives before it would be as interesting as that involving 12 West Virginian miners. Even outlets with a strong reputation for serious foreign news coverage (including The Irish Times) were either slow to cover it, mentioned it only in passing, or overlooked the disaster altogether. Meanwhile, Irish and British television and radio led with the story of a handful of coal miners who had died while working in what one local described as the most dangerous job around.
As events played out over a couple of days, the 24-hour news channels gave West Virginia's events heavy coverage, the rest of Irish and British television news followed suit and, because the print media so often follows the agenda set by the more immediate television news, it eventually filled pages of newsprint too.
It was splashed across the front pages of several Irish newspapers, and was the first item on several radio bulletins. On RTÉ television on Wednesday, in contrast to the Indonesian story, which was relegated as the day went on, the miners' story was treated as increasingly important, becoming the lead item by the nine o'clock news. We were left in no doubt that it was a big story.
It wasn't. Not in Ireland, anyway. It was undoubtedly a terrible tragedy, and an important story both in West Virginia and the wider US, but the extensive coverage given to it here was disproportionate.
The story had already received much attention here before the footage of its terrible denouement guaranteed its place at the top of the news. That transformed it into a mini-movie of the day. It had suspense followed by a horrible twist in which triumph quickly turned to despair. That its central characters where white English-speakers meant that the emotional drama needed no translation.
It's clear that American stories often have either direct or indirect relevance to us, either politically or culturally. But because our media so regularly looks to that country for stories, and the impressive pictures that accompany them, and because most organisations base correspondents there, too many American stories are reported as though they are, for us, local stories.
It is particularly obvious during hurricane season, when one will tune into the news and see a foreign correspondent hanging on to his raincoat as a storm blows through his Florida hotel. Eventually Katrina provided a disaster to justify both past and future exaggerated coverage, but that there were so many reporters in the vicinity of New Orleans when the hurricane hit should not be mistaken as proof of their prescience.
Meanwhile, typhoons come and go across Asia, and hurricanes slap into Central America, but are met by far fewer excited journalists than they are when they land on the US mainland. If it hadn't been for Ariel Sharon, the West Virginia tragedy might have been the international story of the week. The Indonesian landslides, however, seemed destined to be overlooked regardless. The story had poor quality TV pictures, locals who don't speak English, and few western journalists on the scene to clarify the sketchy details.
That the landslide and flooding may not simply have been a horrible act of nature, but exacerbated by deforestation, added a hint of complexity that went beyond West Virginia's simple narrative of hope and despair. Opinions have differed as to whether it was caused purely by heavy rains, or whether land clearing - often to make way for coffee plantations - stripped affected areas of their natural protection. Indonesia is one of the world's largest coffee exporters, so the underlying causes may have important implications that deserved further examination.
Ultimately, the Javanese disaster was overlooked because a couple of hundred people died in a land very far away, and in a part of the world in which disaster seems commonplace.
Journalism students are sometimes told, with bleak sarcasm, that when rating a story's importance they should add zeroes on to the death toll depending on how far east or south a disaster occurs.
How many people needed to die in Indonesia before it became news in this part of the world? Two thousand, or maybe 20,000?
The fact is that, compared to the thrilling story being beamed live from West Virginia, the scooping of a handful of lives from the teeming masses of the Third World was hardly worth mentioning.