What About Mumbai?

Sepia Mutiny asks about the lack of commentary on the Mumbai bombings within the blogosphere.

While trying to deal with the tragedy in Mumbai, I have been wondering what the coverage of the story tells us about ourselves.

I was not surprised by MSM coverage in America: poor in local papers, better in papers with a large desi population or those with an international audience. I was pleased to hear that CNN and CNBC had decent cable news coverage, perhaps because they’re well established in India.

What has baffled me, however, is the relative silence from the world of blogs. The blogosphere is supposed to be the cutting edge, far more advanced than the MSM, yet they’re spending less time on the story.

To be more precise, Technorati’s rankings of popular news stories shows us that average bloggers are paying some attention to the bombings; the fourth, sixth and twentieth most reblogged news stories are the BBC, CNN, and Fox News versions of this story. It’s currently less important than the death of Pink Floyd guitarist Syd Barrett, or coverage of Zidane’s press coverage, but more important than Bob Novak and the big dig.

Where we see a distressing lack of coverage most clearly is amongst political blogs in the top 100 list [Thanks Manish]:

• #5 Daily Kos: no story
• #9 The Huffington Post: short news story, no commentary, just 2 sentences cross-posted from CNN
• #14 Michelle Malkin: Brief post which starts “9/11. 3/11. Now 7/11?”
• #15 Crooks and Liars: 2.5 lines on the subject. However, they do link to a thoughtful analysis elsewhere
• #18 Instapundit: 8 different links to stories
• #43 Talking Points Memo: Nothing A link to this post. [Welcome TPM readers!]
• #44 LGF: 3 stories on the subject
• #47 Powerline: Story about Miss Universe (with a photo of Miss Sri Lanka) but nothing on the bombings
• #64 Newsbusters: Nothing
• #75 Captains Quarters: One detailed story with two updates, fairly early on in the news cycle
• #87 Andrew Sullivan: One article a day after, on the spirit of Mumbai

It is a reasonable question and something that we should spend some time considering. Some of the comments on the post suggested that the lack of commentary was not due to a lack of interest but the bloggers feeling that they had nothing more to add.

And that is an interesting angle to consider. Which would you prefer. You could end up with relatively few posts that didn’t mirror the other or you could have many that looked like a clone of the next.

I don’t know that I buy the explanation of the lack of coverage due to skin color or religion. I really do suspect that it is closer to the former than the latter, but maybe that is my own bias showing through.