How not to cover a tsunami

As Der Spiegel correctly points out, Western media, with their focus on tourists and early warning systems, are "failing to give proper focus to the poverty-stricken locals hit by Sunday's Indian Ocean tsunami." The magazine notes two big problems. First, there is of course the constant media focus on western tourists -- including gripping first-hand blog accounts placed on BBC and CNN web sites -- instead of local residents, who are (as ever) lumped into the "thousands of dead". Second, and less obviously, there's the misplaced media attention on the lack of a sophisticated coastal early warning system in the region. Why misplaced? Well, apparently U.S. officials did have advance warning about the impending tsunamis, and "tried in vain for an hour and a half to warn the region that disaster was about to strike" -- but they didn't know who to contact. The point is underlined by a US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) official, who expressed (surely in frustration): "We don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of the world." This leads the magazine to conclude, "It wasn't the lack of wave-measuring buoys that doomed thousands in the region, it was the lack of system of communicating the danger" to the people who live in the danger zone. The trouble with this conclusion is that it doesn't suggest a simple, high-tech solution to the problem (which Westerners, and especially Americans, are pretty good at handling), but rather a complex organizational-cultural solution (which Americans are not so good at effecting).