Are all deaths equal?

“Since September 11, I’ve been thinking about that incident, about how we in the media participate in a process that confirms and reconfirms the idea that death and murder are tragic, extraordinary and intolerable in some places and banal, ordinary, unavoidable, even expected in others...Are we, in the media, neutral observers of this deadly mathematics? No. Sadly, it is we who do much of the counting. It is we who have the power to choose whose lives are presented in Technicolor, and whose in shades of grey. It is we who decide when to cry ‘tragedy’ and when to shrug ‘ordinary;’ when to celebrate heroes and when to let the bloodless statistics tell the story; who gets to be an anonymous victim - like the Africans killed in the U.S. embassy bombings in 1998 - and who gets to have a story, a family, a life - like the firefighters in New York. On September 11, watching TV replays of the buildings exploding over and over again in New York and Washington, I couldn’t help thinking about all the times media coverage has protected us from similar horrors elsewhere. During the Gulf War, for instance, we didn’t see real buildings exploding or people fleeing, we saw a sterile Space Invader battlefield, a bomb’s-eye view of concrete targets - there and then none. Who was in those abstract polygons? We never found out...The global “we” - as defined by London and New York - now reaches into places that are clearly not included in its narrow parameters, into homes and bars where local losses are not treated as global losses, where those local losses are somehow diminished relative to the grandness, the globalness of our projected plan.”

Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (New York, NY: Picador USA, 2002) 165–67.