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Reader riposte: The US tilt in our media

Reader riposte: The US tilt in our media
Published 28 May 2013 

Ralph Evans responds to Sam Roggeveen:

You are quite right about the American tilt in the media

An extreme case was in 2007 when Cyclone Gonu struck Oman. It was a category 5 super-cyclonic storm, in a desert country where such things are unknown. 600mm of rain fell in a day in Muscat, the capital, and there was 5-metre sea surge. Officially, 50 people were killed, but the real number may have been much larger. Gonu was the biggest natural disaster in Oman's history. There is a nice YouTube description of the event by a British teenager (see above). There are plenty of other graphic Youtube entries, like this. Wikipedia has a good account.

What did our media report? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. It just didn't happen. I heard by e-mail (I have some connections there) and saw a story on the BBC, but our media chose not to report Gonu at all. Contrast this with the blanket coverage here of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, which was  a category 3.



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