Have hard-bitten foreign news editors suddenly developed hearts?
Last night News at Ten devoted nearly 14 minutes of its bulletin to the Chinese earthquake. The night before, the BBC late evening news devoted seven minutes of a 20-minute bulletin to the Burma cyclone. Meanwhile 344 stories have been written about Burma and 176 about the Chinese earthquake in UK national newspapers.
To put it bluntly, dead foreigners in faraway places don't usually dominate the news day after day. It's true that both Cyclone Nargis and the Sichuan earthquake conform to some of the qualities that media commentators Galtung and Ruge defined as crucial (unexpectedness, scale, bad news, conflict and continuity). But it doesn't explain while they are still - both - being reported on.
Usually, the news system likes to concentrate on one disaster at a time. Added to that, there are few Brits involved and the countries themselves are far away (one academic study even analysed how much coverage disasters got compared to how far they were in miles from New York City).
Despite all this media coverage, we actually know little more than we did within hours of either disaster. Editors are running the same story: many dead, aid needed, not enough government action in Burma; many dead, aid needed, government action taken in China. As the poet Edna St Vincent Millay once put it, it's not one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.
So why the continued interest? First, the aid agencies have played a formidable hand. In both Burma and China, little has been seen of the citizen journalism that has become such a feature of disaster reporting since the tsunami in 2004. Instead, it is the aid agencies that are becoming the reporters, particularly in Burma, ready to film and write rather than just facilitating the media.
So, while journalists have found themselves unable to enter Burma or have been thrown out, agencies like Save the Children UK have provided aid worker diaries.
Perhaps one of the most successful is Merlin who provided a diary for the Guardian and whose pictures led the Ten O'Clock News on Sunday. The reports from Labutta - a baby rescued from the water, a man whose grieving family watch him die - show that the aid agencies know exactly what the media want.
And that is why the journalists are still there. These pictures show a tantalising glimpse of a story that has not yet been definitively told. It has become an old-fashioned battle to be the first journalist to the heart of the delta: so far we have had several vivid accounts of attempts - Sun man Nick Parker "nicked by Burma cops", Harry McKenzie of the Sunday Times, turned back on an aid convoy, for example.
While the Burmese junta refuses to allow foreign journalists free access, no news organisation wants to be the first to back down. China has proved itself more open than in the past, but the same feeling is being played out there. Is this genuine interest in humanitarian disasters - or a macho desire not to beaten? Can you imagine the same dedication and resources being applied to a famine in Kenya where there would no such problems to get into the country?
Yet the truth remains that there is only so long journalists can keep playing Scoop. I suspect that foreign news editors are waking up this morning to the appalling news from South Africa with a secret sense of relief; do they now have an excuse to leave the tale of two disasters behind?
