There’s an old cliche headline used to capture the Western media’s condescending attitude towards events in second- and third-world countries — “Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead”.

Well, on Sunday, there was a big plane crash in Russia, many dead, including the Polish president and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders — “wiping out a large portion of the country’s leadership in one fiery explosion” in the words of the New York Times report.

For Australia’s serious media, however, Poland may as well be Upper Volta. None of Australia’s “quality” newspapers rated the story as important enough for their front pages yesterday and the ABC ran it as the third item on its main Sunday night news bulletin. The air crash that killed a major European country’s leadership was covered as though it were minor news in an irrelevant part of the world.

As for today, try Page 15 of The Age. That’d be the obits section:

agepoland