I ask this question after reading Richard North this morning. Richard blogs that the situation facing British troops in Iraq - and the people of Basra - only ever hit the headlines when a British soldier was killed. More widely we can note that when Iraq was descending toward civil war the UK media offered non-stop coverage. The reporting of the success of the Petraeus surge has been lilliputian in comparison.
Another candidate for the most under-reported story of 2008 is the situation in Congo. The death toll is greater than in any other part of the world - it's certainly much bloodier than Gaza. The statistics do not communicate the ugliness of what is happening in this benighted part of Africa but a report in The Times captured some of the barbarity:
"The death toll in the Boxing Day machete massacre in a church in a remote part of eastern Congo may exceed 100, according to reports. Captain Chris Magezi, a Ugandan military spokesman, said that survivors and witnesses had described seeing dozens of people, including women and children, being hacked to death, in an atrocity that he blamed on members of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group. “The scene at the church was unbelievable. It was horrendous. On the floor were dead bodies of mostly women and children cut in pieces,” Captain Magezi said. "Witnesses had reported seeing rebels using machetes, clubs and swords, he said."
Or is the most under-reported phenomenon the march of medical science and the possibility that we'll soon be able to engineer our children?
I'm reminded of the most challenging interview I heard over the Christmas period. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, said that unless people were discussing a news event at the gym or at a dinner party he didn't access the news anymore. So much of it was irrelevant and he could use his time much more productively. Blogging plays good and bad roles in this context. It's good at looking at issues overlooked by the mainstream media; it's bad because it encourages a fast-moving obsession with the new and the new is not always that important.
