I know that Australian soldiers dying isn’t good news, but I used to think it was at least newsworthy. Until yesterday, that is. When news of three dead and seven wounded Australian soldiers collides with a Qantas shutout, guess which event dominates the media?
I looked at the SBS and ABC news on Sunday night. Both accorded Qantas the lead, and discussed it in great detail. ABC, the national broadcaster, initially said the two main stories of the night were the Qantas dispute and the Australian deaths. However, by my reckoning the first 19 minutes were about the Qantas dispute (with a special edition of 7.30 coming after). This was followed by two to three minutes on the Australian deaths, of which nearly half was taken up with the suicide attack that killed 13 US soldiers the same day.
Perhaps leading with a minute on the deaths before launching into the orgy of Qantas news might have been more appropriate, but then again, why would people need to know about the deaths of three Australian soldiers when there are all those stranded passengers out there?
The ABC also wanted to look at how returning Qantas passengers were coping with the delays, and the impact on people wanting to travel to the spring racing carnival. No mention of how three families somewhere in Australia were going to cope with their loved ones not returning at all, or of what the wounded might think about missing the Melbourne Cup.
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian online news also had Qantas as the only lead story, with the soldiers’ deaths relegated to the “other news” sections. The SMH gave the incident the same online prominence as “Gillard wraps up overshadowed CHOGM” and “String of suburban drive-by shootings”.
The Australian got close to a military headline, proclaiming somewhat insensitively that “Qantas declares industrial war”, while down the page in the national news section you could read about the multiple Australian deaths from a real, as opposed to industrial, war. If you missed it, the story about the dead Diggers was just above one called “Burlesque artist lifts stakes in style”.
Our soldiers are robust and well looked after by the government, which is only appropriate given the tasks we require them to perform. And while they don’t ask to be the centre of attention back home simply for risking their lives, it would be nice if they knew that the shooting of 10 of their number was more newsworthy than whether people are going to be able to fly to Melbourne for the cup on Tuesday.
Perhaps our news editors should ask if, in the future, our soldiers in Afghanistan could avoid being killed on grand final weekend, the Boxing Day Test, budget night or any transport strike.
Based on today, it would certainly help them avoid having to make those tough editorial decisions. What a joke.
*Dr Rodger Shanahan was the Chief of Army Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and is now a non-resident Fellow at the Institute. In the Army he had extensive service within the Parachute Battalion Group and was a staff officer in the operations and planning fields. This article was originally published at The Interpreter.
thought that myself this morning actually
This should have been LEAD story on the News, not Qantas. Disgraceful
Yes, it did seem to be downplayed by the media coverage standards of recent years. But I wonder if, as well as the Qantas clash, there is an element of reversion to longer-term norms. 3 Australians dead and 7 wounded would have been a below-average day in either of the two world wars, and received contemporary media coverage (even with censorship etc taken into account) commensurate with that. Even as recently as Vietnam, I wonder whether 10 casualties would have led the TV news, at least without any accompanying vision.
Though admittedly there was a disturbing extra newsworthy element in this incident, in that the casualties were deliberately inflicted by an ‘ally’.
Wars would be a lot shorter if the politicians children were sent to the front to fight. What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? The US attacked Afghanistan when it would not give up Osama bin Laden. He is now dead! The US is now spending billions backing up a corrupt oligarchy for no useful purpose other than face-saving whilst Karzai and his corrupt mates squirrel away billions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts waiting for the eventual collapse. Meanwhile poor young Australian US and German soldiers are dying regularly for no purpose other than political face-saving.
The Afghan defence forces are a joke, and they are riddled with Taliban sympathisers.
The whole thing reminds me of the “all with the way with LBJ mantra” which lead us into the Vietnam war disaster. If the Afghan people won’t fight for their freedom let them put up with the consequences.
To add insight injury now we are being forced to accept Afghan refugees from the war in which we are participating. Get out now.
There’s a chapter in the book Good Omens where a demon – literally a devil’s advocate – tries to explain to his masters that by tying up a mobile phone network for a few hours, he produced far more mayhem and evil than his peers do by seducing a single priest into sin every decade.
People die every day, and soldiers do so in the course of their job – in this case as part of an unpopular and apparently pointless conflict. Is that really more tragic than thousands of people having their lives and business disrupted by flight cancellations?