McCain, Obama and Palin more important than Congo

During the flaming US election the outbreak of yet another full-scale war is feared in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo, former Zaire). Reports are letting us know that we can have a new Rwanda on our hands very soon if actions are not taken. Remembering the happenings in Rwanda in 1994, which left up to one million people slaughtered, this conflict in DRC requires our full attention. Unfortunately, some of our focus is diverted away towards the glitter and glamor of the US presidential elections. Accordingly, I’m really waiting for this election to be over, so the media can start report and draw attention to the DRC. (see video clips)

As I’m curious how media are reporting on the US election vs the DRC-crisis I conducted a simple study of media coverage. I searched today at around 12 am CET for the words “McCain”, “Obama”, “Palin”, “Biden” and “Congo” (or “Kongo” or “DRC”) on the front page of some media’s web sites, which I frequently visit. I counted how many hits each search word got and compiled results in a table (see below). With some dismay, but little surprise, I see that “Obama”, “McCain” and “Palin”(!) get more hits than Congo at most of the visited web pages.

As some of the web sites have several links to the same article (thus using some of my search words over and over again) I quickly tested if the result would differ if I used a ranking system instead of absolute numbers, but the results were practically the same. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this small survey is, as mentioned above, for the sake of the Congolese people let the US election be done with real soon. The other conclusion drawn is that Joe Biden probably needs to fire his campaign leader.

	McCain	Obama	Palin	Biden	Congo
cnn.com	5	3	0	1	6
washingtonpost.com	4	4	1	0	1
time.com	10	13	1	0	3
newsweek.com	5	6	5	0	0
svd.se	6	6	2	3	0
dn.se	8	6	3	0	0
dagbladet.no	3	10	3	0	2
vg.no	0	9	1	0	6
lavanguardia.es	1	8	1	0	0
politiken.dk	6	13	6	1	4
publico.clix.pt	2	4	0	0	1
telegraaf.nl	1	7	4	0	2
mg.co.za	4	13	5	0	4
Sum	55	102	32	5	29

Update: I see that the tears of Obama (due to the passing of his grandmother) have given him lots of media exposure the last couple of hours. I suspect, with a generalising tone, that these tears will give him plenty of sympathy votes in the election. People are after all very easy to turn around when being exposed to some heart aching pictures/videos. Wonder if we can use this in order to get some engagement into the Congo-crisis...?

CNN CNN CNN WS WS Time Time NW SVD SVD SVD AB DN DN DN DN VG VG VG DB DB DB Pol Pol DT LV Pub Pub TT SS SVT Dagen