What would be  more upsetting to you, your mother dying, or your friend’s mother dying? What about if you’ve never met your friend’s mother? All right, which would be more upsetting to you, your mother dying, or a bus full of children plummeting off a cliff on the other side of the world? The two events happen simultaneously, although they are not connected in any way (that we know of; the dark Lord Dennis has been looking shifty)

I mean, it’s your mother, right? Unless you really hate your mother, and have an unnatural fondness for schoolbuses full of children, in which case the authorities are probably already keeping an eye on you. You’re more upset by events which happen closer to you, that involve you in some way. It’s selfish, but it’s human nature. A really smart guy I know wrote an insightful and funny article about it once. Everyone should read it, because it underlines so perfectly how humans work, and why we react to things the way we do. Plus there’s dick jokes included for free. (Not to mention I paraphrased the above example from it. That’s a nice way of saying I stole it, and me linking it is like leaving a note saying “sorry” after I’ve burgled a house)

“Stu, why are you even mentioning this?” I hear you hypothetical readers ask in your thin, whiny voices. I’m getting to that. But keep that idea in mind, the idea of proximity to tragedy making it effect us more.

So. You’ve no doubt heard about the terrible tragedy unfolding in Haiti. A magnitude 7 earthquake ripped through the country, destroying buildings and killing people. The latest reports at the time of my writing this indicate more than 100, 000 people are dead. Not injured; dead. That’s death on a massive scale. That’s more than a football stadium’s worth of people.

And tragedy on that sort of scale is hard to comprehend for some people. Hell, for most people. It hard to imagine an entire city in ruins, and everyone in it dead or seriously injured. That’s a level of destruction that we in the western world are fortunately not privy to. We have no frame of reference for it.

And so the media steps in to inform us of what’s going on, and does its best to relay to us the scope of the tragedy. But we’re on the other side of the world. So not only is the tragedy on a scale we find difficult to comprehend, but it’s half a world removed from us. That can make it difficult for some people to get a handle on the story, to find their way in.

Journalists use a word called “proximity” when talking about stories. It means how close a story is to you, the reader/listener/viewer. How it affects you. Now, while it may sound callous, despite it being a terrible tragedy, the Haiti earthquake will have no real effect on the lives of your average western reader. It’s not something that will effect their commute to work, or how much their rates bill will be, or how much it’ll cost to buy petrol in a month.

But if someone they know was involved, THEN it becomes relevant to them. It sounds completely heartless, but it’s not; it’s just being able to relate to something on the human level. So if they personally knew someone involved in a disaster, it becomes immediately relevant. More broadly though, someone from your town, state or even country can bring a story into your sphere of proximity, and make you pay attention.

There’s been some criticism about the way the Australian media have been covering the Haitian earthquake. In Brisbane especially we’ve had two major points of contact- aid worker Rachel Hoffman was from Brisbane and is currently in a serious condition after surviving the quake. And Brisbane resident Jonas Ramone has family in Haiti who he was talking to literally moments before the quake struck.

People have criticised the coverage of those two stories, because they see it as somehow lessening the stories of the hundred thousand others who died or were injured in the quake. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. First of all, their stories are not going unreported. Both the Australian and international media have been covering this story closely with up to the minute updates in some cases, especially as the event unfolded initially.

Secondly, it is absolutely appropriate for Australian media outlets to report about Australians. It sounds so simnple when you put it like that, but there’s this mentality that exists that we should all be one world nation and not care where people are from. That is ridiculous. Of course I care if one hundred thousand Haitians are dead, but if someone from my city is involved, that provokes an immediate interest in me. That’s not a bad thing, again, it’s human nature. There are people out there who have that reaction regardless of how close they are to an event like this, and those people are good people. But they are most definitely not in the majority.

Not to mention, these people deserve to have their stories told, and they very likely aren’t going to get that from foreign media. Australians report what happened to Australians, Americans Americans, Brits brits, and everyone covered the wider disaster. We take care of our own.

I understand people’s gut reaction against this type of reporting. It’s born from hearing reports that start “No Australians were killed when a bomb ripped through…” or something like that. Making the lack of local deaths the story. And that IS wrong. There’s no question. Actual, real people are dead, and we’re happy none of our mob got hurt. That kind of mentality in the news was parodied brilliantly in the Monty Python sketch “News for Parrots“.

But that’s not what’s happening here. There is a difference between “No Australians were killed when an earthquake tore through Haiti” and “A hundred thousand people were killed when an earthquake tore through Haiti. Australians are believed to have been hurt.” It’s not a big difference, but it’s an important one.