This story is both informative and sad. As an American who thinks that I keep up with international news, I too, was blissfully ignorant of this flood. At the same time,I was well aware of the Gold metals being won at the Olympics.

Sadly third world disasters get little attention unless thy are of monumental proportions, like the tsunami, or affect us - also like the tsunami This was driven home to me in 1975 when I was visiting Geneva. The local newspaper gave front page treatment to Cyclone Tracey in Darwin, lamenting the loss of 45 lives. Many pages into the paper was a small paragraph about the death of 450 people in a flood in India.

At least these days we can use the internet to keep in touch with what is happening around the world. The Al Jazeera English edition provides coverage of significant events in most places, perhaps because it doesn't have a western perspective.

A huge human disaster getting in the way of australian sport reporting ? Don't be silly !

Let's be realistic about it. The average Australian couldn't give a rat's *&$# about what happens in that part of the world unless they start making cheap cars and we lose jobs because of it.

David

I was also very frustrated by the lack of media in Australia about the floods!! I have a lot of family in Vientiane and the best we were hearing was from them on the phone when it was working. The situation seemed quite confused and a huge amount of people were impacted by the floods. It is amazing how sport obsessed Australian are (and the Olympic coverage was even more boring than usual!), however even at normal times there is little coverage of Asian disasters like this in Australia, people just dont care. It's ok to go there for a holiday, but we wouldnt want to actually be concerned about the people over there, they just drive the buses and run the hotels and make the cocktails. Not real people at all apparently! Very frustrating!

Many thanks Melody for your thoughtful reality check. It would be nice if it jolted the SMH and the ABC into a re-think about what is newsworthy and what is the froth. I also appreciated the comments of others such as pmac. As a short term English language teacher in Da Nang Vietnam, I too have realised, with pain, that many of my fellow Australian (and English, Canadian and US) ex pats, simply don't regard people from Asia, and other areas of the world such as Latin America) as real people.

As we come to 11 September, and the predictable outpouring of sorrow at the US events of a few years ago, let's remember the other 11 September, the one that happened in Chile in 1973, when a democratically elected government was overturned with US military and financial support, and thousands were butchered.