World news is crowded out by coronavirus-obsessed media
“China and India brawl at 14,000 feet” ran a headline in the New York Times earlier this week. The story referred to how Chinese and Indian forces have been squaring off for weeks now along the Line of Actual Control in the high Himalayas. Observing their truce agreement the troops pelted each other with rocks and sticks but never actually opened fire.
Yet the standoff is more ominous than it appears. Both sides have rushed in thousands of reinforcements and both have strategic reserve forces in the sector of more than a quarter of a million.
This is a regional dispute about access to roads and other rights with profound strategic international implications. Yet the story has received scant play in the international news pages across the world.
With the coronavirus pandemic the broader international news agenda has gone into lockdown too. Even related stories, such as Trump’s petulant withdrawal of the US from the WHO, have hardly had a mention.
This could just be a sign of the times, and perhaps we will soon get the broader canvas of news and reporting we need and deserve. However, I have a sneaking feeling that this may be the beginning of yet another deadening of the art and action of serious journalism – as opposed to artefact or ersatz journalism via apps and social platforms.
Just this week we have been told that Microsoft has decided to replace some 27 journalists by artificial intelligence software. The robots are apparently better at selecting and editing the stories than humans. “Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.”
Yet the pandemic has narrowed the range of news coverage dramatically. Tune in to one of the mainstream television news programmes and you get only a small range of topics being covered. Covid-19 , a bit of Brexit, and now the riots and protests in America. The culture of news, especially amongst the broadcasters, seems thinner by the day.
But after 52 years of reporting the news from around the world, this particular news turkey is not getting ready to vote for his Christmas yet.
So here are five big stories that you may have missed, and which need to be aired more widely and scrutinised for their importance.
The China – India Brawl at 14,000 feet. These two powers have been probing and provoking one another across 2,100 miles of border, the so-called Line of Actual Control, for more than a decade. It is not just a border dispute, but a symptom of a deeper clash between the world’s two most populous nations. The stakes have been raised by the corona pandemic. Bruno Macaes, author of two books on the region, warns that China fears losing tech giant companies such as Qualcomm and Apple to India.
A war was fought between the two in 1962 here in the highest battlefields in history. There is no easy solution and both leaderships need to stand on their authority. It may soon not just be running border fights with sticks and stones.
Flare-up in Libya . The second half of May saw a dramatic twist of fortune on the battlefields around Libya’s capital , Tripoli. A fortnight ago the forces of the UN-recognised (but fancifully named) Government of National Accord managed to break the stranglehold of Khalifa Haftar on the capital. Haftar, based in Benghazi in the east and backed by Egyptian, UAE and Russian mercenary forces, had been trying to dominate the whole coastal area of Libya for the best part of a year.
Largely thanks to Turkish attack drones and vehicle mounted jammers, the GNA forces took the crucial air base of al-Watiya, allowing the the land route from Tripoli to Tunisia to be opened again . Russia pulled 1,200 mercenaries to deep bases in the Libyan desert. Some 12 Russian warplanes have been flown in via the Russian Hmeimim base in Syria. Russia has been forced to escalate its backing of Haftar which in turn has provoked the US to deploy troops, under the guise of training units, to neighbouring Tunisia.
Fighting has flared up since the weekend, with four Turkish attack drones downed and Haftar’s forces claiming to have retaken the international airport south of Tripoli. Russia is trying to get peace talks started , fearing another bloody stalemate like Syria. “In a way, it runs deeper,” says a senior Italian diplomat in the region. “It’s a battle for supremacy between the two big regional powers – Turkey and Egypt – it’s the sultan and pharaoh again.”
Renewed Cyber Confrontation between Israel and Iran . At the end of April a cyber, now believed to have been launched by Iran, damaged six wastewater treatment plants across Israel. At one station the attackers appear to have had full control of the system for some time. It was later reported by intelligence agencies in Britain and America that the operation aimed at pushing excess chlorine into the water supply.
On 9th May Israel retaliated with a cyber strike at Iran’s major container port at Shahid Rajace close to the narrowest stretch of the Straits of Hormuz. Traffic was delayed for more than three days with queues of ships stretching across the waterway, according to satellite images. Iran appears to have struck back with an attack on the computers of small businesses in Israel, stealing the details of more than 160,000 Israeli credit cards. The Israelis were caught on the back foot. Not only were Israel’s water and sewage systems very nearly wrecked; it was far from clear who could should be in charge at such an emergency. “The Iranians found a perfect spot to hit, from their standpoint – vulnerable operational infrastructure that is not deemed of critical importance, and where areas of responsibility are hazy,” commented the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz.
This appears to be a story that has far from run its course – yet it has hardly broken cover in the international news world.
Imminent Social and Economic Collapse in Lebanon. Lebanon, with one in four of its population of 7 million a refugee from Syria or beyond, is facing collapse. In the refugee camps one mother told a UNICEF reporter “I fear starvation now more than the coronavirus.” Not many cases of the virus have been reported from the region’s camps, now home to 5.6 million Syrians – possibly because there is so little epidemiological reporting. The same goes for Yemen , where Covid-19 is now said to be rampant in homes, aid stations and hospitals from the capital of Saana to the government-held areas of the south.
There has been some reporting of the crisis by the indefatigable Lyse Doucet among others. But the stories don’t seem to be registering with the newsrooms of the big papers and broadcasters.
A Fresh Outbreak of Ebola in the Congo has been reported by the WHO in the northwest Wangata health zone . This is the 11th recurrence since Ebola was discovered in the country in 1976. An outbreak in the east of the country is coming to an end. It is an unexpected setback – already four of the six testing positive in Wangata have died, and WHO medics fear it is about to spread. “Covid-19 isn’t the only health threat the people here face,” said the WHO director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, alluding to the fact that the Democratic Republic of Congo has just suffered a devastating outbreak of measles.
There’s another subject that’s being given little airing, despite being so close to the pandemic. This is the pervasive threat of zoonotic pandemics – the viruses that can move from animals to humans like Ebola, HIV, and SARS-CoV-02 , the name of the virus from which the Covid-19 comes from. The problem was explained brilliantly by Dame Jane Goodall on Radio Four’s “The Life Scientific” on Tuesday this week. She was talking about the denuding of the landscape and forest in Gombe district in Tanzania, where she has given a lifetime to studying the chimpanzees. At the end of the programme she explained how the virus-carrying animals of the region had been forced into the sprawling cities and towns.
Dame Goodall explains the dangers from virus-carrying “reservoir animals” in a powerful essay available on the Mongabay, an ecology and nature news website. Zoonotic virus-carrying animals are now fare in markets selling live or “wet” animals or carcasses across Africa and much of Asia. She is particularly worried about bush meat trafficking and trade in exotic, potentially lethal, propduce like bear’s spit.
Yet proliferation of the species-crossing viruses, the zoonoses, is barely a footnote in current Covid-19 reporting. By a conservative estimate there are now 5,000 different coronaviruses now incubating in the bat population of China alone. Why isn’t that in the news more ?