Wrap your brain around the number 21 million. Now look at these numbers.
From Media Monitors, a wrap of mentions in the media from the past week of Oprah Winfrey’s Australian tour announcement, set alongside media mentions of the growing crisis in Pakistan:
Bear in mind that UN officials say the scale of the devastation in Pakistan is bigger than the 2004 tsunami, and the Haiti earthquake, because 21 million people are affected. Need we remind you that that’s roughly our entire population.
So, is this neat little graphic proof that Tourism Australia’s decision to shell out about $3.5 million to secure Oprah Winfrey’s visit is already paying off in a blitz of free publicity? Or a depressing commentary on what makes news?
Possibly both.
***
Extra, extra, read all about it: the Crikey Free Newspaper Tracker continues to be inundated with sightings, so much so, we can’t keep up with you all. Click here for the latest, and we’ll keep plotting the piles of free papers on our map as you send them in:
Another number to ponder from the New York Times today; it was announced by the US Census Bureau that 44 million Americans were in poverty in 2009, or one in seven residents. Millions more were surviving only because of expanded unemployment insurance and other assistance.
And the numbers could have climbed higher; one way embattled Americans have gotten by is sharing homes with siblings, parents or even nonrelatives, sometimes resulting in overused couches and frayed nerves but holding down the rise in the national poverty rate, according to the report.
How will that stack up against Oprah’s tour announcement?
Interesting to note the massive figures for TV, radio and the press compared to the more balanced figures for internet coverage.
I should’ve guessed it would look like that though. I know that if I want to hear about something important, I don’t turn on the TV.
It is an alarming but also surprising set of numbers. Truly, I am astonished that either pieces of news received any coverage at all.
In Melbourne, which is in the middle of the preliminary finals of the “”””Football”””” It is an unwritten law that during these finals-which seem to take as long to play as it took for teams to get into the final-serious news is frowned upon. WAGS and fags take over the town. People like Mr and Mrs Edelsten-she of the gigantic boobs and a cigarette paper to cover the nipples- take over the news.
Hell! If we were, as of this moment, being invaded by our neighbours to the north, the Herald Sun would bury it inside a tiny box on page four. Headed by ‘Katter keeps kalm’.
As for Ms Winfrey, she works on the same principal as Buckingham Palace, and probably employs the same amount of people. It’s called saturation bombing.