Originally Posted by
Yaatri
Comparing devastation can be a bit misleading as the hurricane that impacted you personally would be more devastating to you. It might make some to feel that their suffering is being ignored.
Katrina flew over FL as category one, strengthened to category 5 as it moved across the Gulf of Mexico and wakened to category 3 before making landfall. Sandy hovered between tropical storm and category 1 hurricane. East coast is populated more densely and real estate is more expensive here. Monetary damage due to Sandy might exceed that by Katrina.
The demographics of the people hit and how closely some (perhaps even much larger) population identifies with the group or people in the population hit probably has a lot to do with it.
Whether it's a massive act of man-created terror hitting people in NYC or a major natural disaster hitting people in NYC, that would tend to get more and more genuinely sympathetic, empathic coverage internationally than a lot more dead, poor people or people in a poor place that is a disaster zone or otherwise just one big disaster.
That said, if you recognize that the news coverage discrepancy is distorted in such way, you should see how much more fictional TV dramas and sitcoms are in representing better off persons/families than poor persons/families unless it has to do with playing some kind of class warfare with negative portrayals of the disadvantaged or the popularly-disliked/despised if at the upper end.
The blame, if any for this, largely rests with the relevant audience(s) getting what is wanted by the relevant audience(s).
When thousands of poor people (if not many tens of thousands) die -- like say some such disasters in Bangladesh -- it sometimes doesn't get more than a handful of minutes (if even more than 3 minutes) of actual spoken news coverage on any given ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/MSNBC/CNN TV station over the course of a month of the disaster.