What I found were many articles like this for coverage of the Armenian quake, while the trend for coverage of Mexico City quake looked a lot more like this. Essentially I found that, as opposed to directly calling its audience to aid the victims like when the Mexico City quake occurred, the coverage of the Armenian quake was almost solely describing stories of individual Americans giving aid. The distinction became that while the Mexico coverage called for aid, the Armenia coverage described aid.
This distinction and its effects became very clear when I found that the US government donated approximately $11 million to Mexico in 1985, while they only donated $1.9 million to Armenia in 1988. The fact that Britain, Japan and Germany all donated over $10 million and Bulgaria, France, Italy, and South Korea all donated at least double what the US did reveals that discrepancy between Mexico aid and Armenia aid was not accidental or a result of money problems.
The mere description of personal, emotional relief efforts in the case of Armenia seemed to make its audience feel as though this was how America as a whole was responding to the disaster on a large scale, when in fact these stories were fairly isolated and unique. The audience felt like relief efforts were being taken care of, and thus became less motivated and obligated to help.
These findings troubled me deeply on a personal level. I struggled to understand how we as the United States could let political tensions get in the way of us helping people who are in desperate who, quite probably, have nothing to do with the political tensions at all. The vast majority of people in Armenia weren’t primarily characterized by being America-hating Communists, they were just poor, hard-working people living their daily lives in a different part of the world than us. They were people just like we are people, and helping them when 50,000 are dying seems like an unthinkably, instinctually obvious thing to do. This research made me feel not only incredibly bad for the immediate victims of the disaster, but even worse for those who may have been able to be saved if the US had actually helped in a legitimate manner in the relief efforts.
In an attempt to deal with these difficult feelings I hope to be able to commemorate the disaster and its victims, especially those who died unnecessarily, in the following pages.