I can't write about the tsunami. I can't even read the New York Times or watch BBC World News (on PBS here at 7 pm, go Maryland) without crying so I can't compose anything remotely coherent about it.

I can, however, write about the media coverage of the tsunami. I've basically been watching CNN or BBC World News and reading the NYT or the Washington Post (I'm a good little liberal) so everything that follows applies only to those sources.

Overall, the coverage has been pretty good, I think. CNN has been the worst of all these, but CNN also has had by an order of magnitude the most coverage, so I'm willing to forgive a bit. I recognise the need to show some hopeful moments and I think that nobody has had these moments overtake the vast scale of the tragedy, even if they seem to be stratching sometimes (ie, this little girl has been lying in the hallway of the hospital for a week but a doctor could finally look at her is not a particularly hopeful moment). I winced when Anderson Cooper (who I usually like) asked a British woman who had recently moved to a Sri Lankan town "Did you fear the worst? Did you fear that your [new] house had been destroyed?" after she described where she, her husband, and her son were at the time of the tsunami. The woman handled it with a fair amount of grace, saying that she didn't even think about her house since she was worried about her neighbors and friends.

My real complaint is the focus on Western tourists. There's nothing wrong with showing an American family that came home or even the SI model's story, but they shouldn't overtake the coverage of the people who actually live in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. However, the media focus on the tourists ignores the billions of dollars that will be needed to allow the "locals" to live in their cities again. Tourists can leave and go back to their intact homes and their intact jobs in countries with infrastructures not affected by the tsunami. The cost of thousands of lives is still terrible, but the rebuilding is at least manageable. But the Maldives have rebuilding costs of twice their GDP and may very well not be inhabitable again in the long term (like Tuvalu). Aceh lost 100,000 people out of a population of around 4 million and around 2 million people have lost their homes there. The number of injured is overwhelming the available hospitals. And this is not something faced by the Swede vacationing in Phuket. The focus on these relatively few affected Westerners trivialises the amount of reconstruction that will be necessary.