Worst disasters?
BBC is one of my favorite news sources – they bend over backwards to do a good job without injecting themselves into it too much. (They don’t have multi-million dollar “news anchors,” for instance. At BBC they’re called “News readers” – heh)
But sometimes I notice a real blooper. Take this wrap-up of some of History’s worst natural disasters compared to the tsunami. They mention a few quakes, hurricanes, a famine, a flood that killed 900,000. But they missed the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed over twenty million people, including over a half-million Americans. Fatalities from the epidemic far exceeded those of World War One. Since BBC’s list goes back to the year 1556, how’d they miss that?
Maybe news organizations should hire more history graduates. What is “journalism” but very recent history? I’m sure somebody will set me straight on this…