Why photos only?
Seemingly every issue of The Daily Star features a photograph of environmental degradation in Bangladesh; often on the paper's very front page, in full colour. However, rarely, if ever, does any kind of investigative report accompany such photographs.
Take yesterday's (Monday, July 28, 2008) edition of The Daily Star for example. The front page of the paper's main section spotlights a photo of a polluted section of Chittagong-city "where untreated industrial waste is dumped into canals". The last page of the main section (page 16) similarly exhibits a photo of a polluted Gulshan Lake, where "street urchins scavenge through the garbage for something usable". No report or story is tied to these pictures. No indication as to who, specifically, the wrong-doers are or what the authorities might or might not be doing in response to these flagrant violations of national law. These photographs just take their regular seats on these pages, chronically alone, as if they are not really 'news' but merely part of Bangladesh's everyday scenery not unlike a hawker peddling wrist-watches on the street or people enjoying an evening sunset around the parliament building. The caption below the page 16 photograph does claim that "the trash dumped [in Gulshan Lake] continues to pollute the lake", but nothing more. This type of journalism is so typical that I, as a reader, have stopped even looking for the accompanying news article -- because it almost never exists.
I wonder what your aim is with these pictures? Are they intended to raise the eyebrows of the paper's readership? Are the supposed to elevate the consciousness of the public with respect to the dire environmental situation faced by the country? Or, on the other hand, does The Daily Star simply intend to conciliate the nation's obvious environmental apathy? If in fact The Daily Star is trying to make some kind of point, what is it? Would it be too much to ask of DS to actually pursue the details surrounding these environmental violations?
Bangladesh is arguably the most polluted country in the free world. Many claims have been made at least for Dhaka being the world's most polluted city. Mr. Zunaid of Banani, Dhaka, extolled the virtues of nuclear energy in a letter to you at the expense of any kind of insight as to why in fact the building of a nuclear power plant in Bangladesh could very well be the worst potential response to the country's energy/environment problem. I believe that if we all just started doing what we can to raise a generation of socially and environmentally conscious citizens, a lot of these problems would take care of themselves without a need for a myopic and possibly catastrophic 'quick-fix'.
I also believe that The Daily Star could play an invaluable role in this regard by telling the public what the implications are of the environmental damage they exhibit.
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