The search for depravity around the world is a particularly western fascination, it seems.  Frank Furedi at sp!ked says that the media loves to point out some failed society somewhere and how horribly its people are suffering.  Think Darfur.  Think Myanmar.  Think China.

Recently, I have found it difficult to take seriously Western media coverage of events overseas. Often, the coverage is driven by a mean-spirited desire to discover that ‘they’, too, have problems – and that many of them are far worse than ours. There seems to be an urge to deliver shallow sermons about the failures of morally inferior communities, and an impulse to gloat over their troubles. Within minutes of receiving news about the terrible earthquake in China this week, we were told about the shoddy structures built by corrupt contractors, who were so concerned with taking advantage of the country’s economic miracle that they didn’t bother to make anything earthquake-proof.

Events that occur far away give the media a licence to live out its fantasies, and allow it to tell cautionary tales about dark places over there. Until recently, the media obsession with the pornography of suffering was confined to Africa, and to a handful of ‘failed’ societies. In the US, Darfur has become the cause célèbre of an entertainment industry in search of a crusade. Across the Atlantic, here in Britain, Zimbabwe has emerged as the ideal place for a twenty-first century replay of the Heart of Darkness. Only this time Kurtz – the white ivory trader-cum-demigod in Conrad’s novel – has a microphone in his hand as he tells TV viewers that ‘something must be done’.

This is an ironic about-face for the liberal elite, who are the first to decry some terrible situation in another country.  For a long time, they talked about how other, poorer nations were morally superior to the West and how our oppressive Eurocentric ideas only made these other cultures seem depraved.  Now, the liberal elite seems to be doing just the opposite, calling these other cultures, or at least their leadership, depraved.  Sounds awfully conservative to me.  Read on about how news of international devastation is a kind of “News Porn.”