Umm, this is about some brown skinned people killing other brown skinned people. Why would you think the press would care? I care because those brown skinned people are humans just like me. It's a real tragedy. But unless the people have white skin, our press couldn't care less. Think about it, in the Mumbai attacks, our press focused on the few foreigners that were killed. The locals were of no consequence as far as our press was concerned. Sadly, I'll die before that changes.

Hilzoy, you are an asset.

I would love to search the blogs, but, this would kinda put me at a disposition don't you think? Speaking of the patriot act.

I have taken it upon myself to try and get familiar with a few words in Arabic and Farsi.

Example, to say ,"what's your name in Arabic," would be pronounced as 'is mock he'

or to say "my name is,"
would be pronounced as 'is me'

But hey, keep us posted, great job!!!

Oh Hilzoy,

I forgot to say, the news would rather talk about Britney Spears or Sarah Palin!!!!!!!!!

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Sounds a little like American foreign policy and the sociopathic indifference of American voters to death and suffering they've caused or contributed to in the world. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan - whatever, nobody here really cares.

We responded to a very real terrorist attack with two very phony wars. There were no WMDs in Iraq and we can't or won't actually go after bin Laden in Pakistan (and even likely let him get away in the first place so as not to undermine our rationale for war in Iraq).

How's that working out for us and our titular allies in the region? Nobody cares. And so long as nobody in this country really cares what's going on in the rest of the world, we really shouldn't be meddling in it so much if at all.

2 words..."Operation Mockingbird"

Corporate manufactured news and government propaganda.

What is unreported is as significant as what is reported.

I don't expect to learn much about the rest of the world from TV news. But major newspapers ought to do better.

To be honest, the pitifully bad coverage of world news on the cable networks is really a much greater embarrassment than the mediocre newspaper coverage. CNN, at least, actually has a widespread international network that would enable them to cover this stuff if they wanted to. And all the 24 hour nets spend ridiculous amounts of timing on terrible talk shows that spend their time on inane horse race analysis of AMerican politics, generally framed with shows about missing blond girls. Does CNN even have a single decent show about world news? How hard would it be to devote an hour or two daily to having decent foreign coverage? They probably even have the shows already produced for CNN International.

There are riots all over the world these days, Hilzoy. Where does one start?

And it's not going to get any better, with the financial market in the state it's in. Consider it "someone" wanting to turn down the dial on the turmoil ... (Have you checked out the riots in China?)

1st - it is a travesty that this important story isn't being covered (especially considering the heightened tensions in the region).

but it's a lot more complicated (and interesting) then the simple language dynamic issue you imply.

MQM is the mohajir party. ie: it represents the descendants of those that went to pakistan after partition. there are two main groups of mohajirs, urdu and gujarati speakers. in broad general terms the gujarati speakers were more upper class (and not as big mqm supporters as the urdu ones). urdu itself is the main language of pakistan but in Karachi the local language is Sindhi. Since karachi is the commercial capital a lot of the immigrants from india settled there which led to tensions between the mohajirs and the sindhis. mqm and ppp (which is based in sindh) have traditionally been rivals but are cobbled together in a coalition right now. Anyway i digress.

the interesting thing here is that this is a clash between two different immigrant waves of similar economic class. the partition era immigrants who tended to be more urbanized and secular and the post afghan war pashtuns who are more rural and conservative. on top of this structure are the old school pakistanis. this issue is actually huge.

as a westerner and someone who does not like the idea of a nuclear war in the subcontinent i have to say. go MQM.

eh, i went too far. mqm is the most outspoken anti taliban force in the country. it also has ties to india. there is a danger of backlash that people might consider this indian payback (as it were) for the bombay attacks. there's also a danger that it could be true. there've been highly disturbing strictly ethnically targeted atrocities in these riots. and this could seriously damage the already tenuous coalition government. this really sucks.

The wars between the MQM and other factions killed thousands in the 80s and 90s.

But it was not 'news'.

The reality is for the average Pakistani, those were much more dangerous times than even the current Taliban-inspired jihadist attacks, which tend to focus on foreigners and government targets (not always).

It's simply another measure of the degree to which we are 'western slanted' in our media coverage and perceptions.

India has had worse terrorist attacks than Mumbai last week... but 20 westerners didn't die doing it.

The world's worst suicide bombers? Al Quaida in Iraq? Hamas in Israel?

(answer below)

Tamil Tigers of course. But no media piece would make that clear.

"They were careless people, Bush and Cheney -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Fixed that. Even F. Scott needs to be updated every now and then.

I don't expect to learn much about the rest of the world from TV news. But major newspapers ought to do better.

Geez, Hilzoy, it's not like Pakistan's important or anything.

Just because it's an extremely unstable nuclear power whose possession of such weapons ought to give night sweats to every major world leader, whose tribal areas are a refuge for the Taliban we've been fighting in Afghanistan and Bin Laden & Co. that attacked us on 9/11/01 - I mean, what is that to us? Why should we care about such a piddling, unimportant, backwater of a country?

Valuethinker,

Of course the U.S. doesn't talk much about Sri Lanka.

In fact, when 9/11 happen, we had American tourists kidnapped by terrorists in the Philipines but no mention of it.

We had the kidnapped Americans in Columbia - no mention.

And the same day we had 9/11 there was terrorists attacks in Israel.

But that goes back to what I said earlier, foreigners always say, "stupid American," or "dumb American." Again, this is through no fault of our own - it's the news media.

I had subscribed to Al Jazeera earlier this year, but it was in Arabic - no English subtitles, so I got rid of it.

BBC News has a lot of information, as well as Arabic news with English subtitles.

It's sad, but, if we don't see it on the news, we don't know what's going on.

Just for information, there's a website www.arabfilm.com where you can order documentaries or films about anywhere in the middle east if you don't want to go to Barnes & Noble.

Annjell, I was going to say, the BBC is always worth a look/listen. The Asheville NC NPR station plays the BBC from midnight to five am, and it 's always instructive to catch the world news. Their site is comprehensive and usually quite reliable.

Here is a site that pulls stories from around the world about the US, "Watching America".
http://watchingamerica.com/News/

They need donations, and are another good value.

I checked the International Herald Tribune -- there's an article today about a bomb detonating in a busy bazaar in Peshawar. But when I input the search for "Karachi", all I got were links to the violence in India.

Mr Bill, thanks for the information. I will definitely look into it today.

Newspapers can make the reader feel like the English gentlemen reading the Times each morning before WWI, center of the civilized world and all that. Of course, the Internet disrupts that dream.

Its been a long time since I expected decent coverage from US based publications. Although they are small and have limited resources, McCatchy, and the CristianScience monitor do at least try to do a fair job. So the issue, is how well such events are covered in the foreign press.

That, said, there are two reasons that Pakistani internal events are low on the news priority list. One, is that it is a dangerous place for journalists, especially western journalists. And, secondly, but for similar reasons, it is a dangerous place for western visitors in general, so there are very few. People are much more interested in the happenings in places they can imagine actually visting someday.

It isn't that unusual for Pakistan. Under Benazir Bhutto most big cities had riots at least as frequently as every week. Besides that, in the northwest is a nearly continuous civil war between the government forces and the rebellious Taliban forces. And besides that there is nearly constant warfare along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. And besides that was the recent Mumbai raid. Add to that the highly publicized murders of Daniel Pearl and other journalists, and you can see why most journalists avoid most places in Pakistan, and most of what happens in Pakistan is never reported no matter how dramatic.

Not that I want to defend newspapers, or the rest of the MSM, but there is a surplus of newsworthy world events at the moment, and riots in Karachi probably rank rather far down the list. Granted the Karachi riots have long-term implications for the stability of Pakistan, but newspapers have never been much good at analysis (except for regurgitating conventional wisdom). Right now there's: (1) a massive crisis in Zimbabwe that could affect all of southern Africa; (2)the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, that could escalate into a shooting war;(3)piracy on the horn of Africa that is affecting a very important shipping route (yes, it's a flashy story, but it's has economic implications); (4) the downward spiral of the world economy. Plus there are some stories that have fallen off the media radar screen that have a potential to create larger humanitarian tragedies: i.e. eastern Congo; Darfur; Somalia. IMHO, all these stories rate higher than riots in Karachi. And cash-strapped newspapers probably don't have the resources to look outward at the world. They're focusing on local and national news (which is pretty grim right now). OK, I've defended them enough. Back to our regularly scheduled OJ coverage...

Pakistan deserves more concern and attention than the world community has given it. Nukes and political instability, religious zealots and a quashed secular lawyer's movement, judiciary and executive institutional rivalry - it's not looking too good right now.

Nations throughout the world need to boldly spring into action through, let's say, UN Security-Council mandates and begin a rebuilding of civil society in this most volatile region of our precious world. Anything short of such an effort shows we failed to help a failing nation when such failure could least be afforded.

If we wish to right our world since the 911 attacks, get out of Iraq and go after non-national combatants using international cooperation through police action backed by military force when the affected nation requests it. Using existing means with more effective efforts and employing existing international institutions with more effective diplomacy will secure us, (and our values), far better into the future than the Bush Doctrine has up to now! -Kevo

Quiet, please!!! The west is taking India's side right now, and painting a picture of Pakistan without American toady Pervez Musharraf in charge that leaves no room for Pakistan having troubles of its own. Pakistan is a nature of terrorists who are interested in destabilizing peaceful India - can't you stay on message?

Pakistan should not be at the bottom of the radar. This is where most of the terrorist training camps are. We could do so at our own peril.

As far as westerners not welcome in Pakistan, that goes for Afghanistan, and the majority of the islamic countries.

I'm no expert, but from my understanding, this movement against the U.S. started in Egypt. Mr. Said Qtuyb. The Muslim Brotherhood, prisoners in Egypt, then branched off to Al-Quaeda.

Apparently, Mr. Qtuyb studied in Texas. Didn't like the lifestyle of Americans, as he would call without morals, the drinking, drugs, dancing, male and female dating - sexual relationships.

This is pretty much a culture-religious war.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but arn't 99% of newspapers utterly dependent on the wire services for things like Pakistan coverage? Reuters and the AP are the people we should be looking at.

Add to that the highly publicized murders of Daniel Pearl and other journalists, and you can see why most journalists avoid most places in Pakistan, and most of what happens in Pakistan is never reported no matter how dramatic.

1) Pakistan has plenty of news organizations and plenty of news coverage. A simple google search reveals tens of thousands of stories about "dramatic" happenings there.

2) During the last five years Iraq had virtually NO reporters outside the Green Zone, had the most reporters killed of any country in the world, and was notorious for jailing reporters.

In the case of Iraq it suited your politics to act as if good news was being under-reported (when it fact it was a clusterfuck beyond all imaging). In the case of Pakistan it suits your politics to act as if bad news is being under-reported in Pakistan.

Does your hypocrisy know no ends?