At 11:41 am when a massive earthquake ripped through the mountainous northern region of Armenia, killing 25,000 – 50,000, cries for help came almost immediately. These cries were very similar to those heard just 3 years earlier, when a quake that struck Mexico City killed somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 people. Whether the cries were from underneath the rubble of a toppled office building or from the government offices in the capital, they were all marked by the same desperate, pleading note. The focus of the world shifted to answering these calls, and in the United States the question became how to do so.

Normally the proceedings seem obvious: help the victims as much as we reasonably can; but in the case of Armenia, a member of the Soviet Union for 65 years, things get more complicated. The ethical question of helping the victims of a disaster gains a new geopolitical edge that appears to contradict the clear moral answer. With Armenia as a direct Cold War enemy of the US, it becomes rather hazy as to how the US should answer their calls for aid.

The moral answer is yes. The political answer is no. Help them as much as you can, even if they’re your enemies. Help them as little as possible, because they’re your enemies. This dichotomy is stark and difficult to evaluate. Objectively valuing one side over the other is just simply not possible. For this reason, a very interesting question arises as to how people; the government, the general public, the media; respond to it. Of particular interest is the media because the media is really the public’s only eye into a foreign disaster, and thus how the media deals with this dilemma in its coverage of the disaster likely has a large effect on how the public, which has a large influence on the government, sees and feels about the disaster. 

My research attempted to answer these questions. I attempted to figure out how the media (specifically the print media, even more specifically the New York Times) portrays disasters and their relief efforts in enemy countries with respect to how they are portrayed when they occur in allied countries.