The tsunami got more media attention in six weeks than all the other world's top 10 "forgotten emergencies" did over the past year, says a new report.

An excerpt from The Guardian story (reg. req'd):

The Asian tsunami attracted more media attention in the first six weeks after it struck than the world's top 10 "forgotten" emergencies did over a whole year, according to a report from Reuters.

Other emergencies - from the devastating wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan to HIV/Aids - have been neglected by world's media, said a new survey from the information group's humanitarian news site Reuters AlertNet, which analysed coverage in 200 English-language newspapers.

The survey comes just a day after research showed that malaria had become the world's forgotten killer, with half a billion people suffering from the disease but drawing a fraction of the attention of "new" killers such as HIV/Aids.

The tsunami, which killed an estimated 300,000 people, has squeezed the already low levels of press coverage of other emergencies, receiving 34,992 citations in the press to the end of February.

But in the full year up to then, the next most covered emergency - the conflict in Sudan - generated just a fifth of the tsunami's coverage, with 7,661 mentions.

For more about this, see my posting AlertNet - All crises and humanitarian disasters, all the time.