Faced with tsunami and revolution, you have to choose one above the other

There are several things to say about the momentous coverage of two momentous stories this past week. That while ordinary people have fled Japan's danger areas and Libya's battlezones, journalists – sometimes at real peril to themselves – have tried to go to the heart of the crises. That the investment in news, particularly television news, has been overwhelming. That it has been a sustained effort of vivid reportage and (mostly) rational analysis. But there's also a question. How do you choose between Story A, in which a tsunami kills thousands and threatens a disastrous nuclear meltdown, and Story B, in which a berserk Arab dictator, threatened by democratic revolution, sets his forces marching on a city where a million vulnerable people live? And the answer is that there had to be a choice. The tsunami and its aftermath was every Hollywood nightmare rolled into one. Libya, inevitably, slipped down schedules and onto inside pages. The pressure – let's face it, the media pressure – to get no-fly restrictions and more in place abated until Benghazi seemed on the brink of falling. Well, this week will tell us what happens next. But the problem revealed is the simple difficulty of chronicling two world events in parallel – of telling a story of true horror now happening and, out there in the desert, of horrors about to happen. You can't have frontline people in two places at the same time. You can't take in two cries for help simultaneously. Forget the natural balance of coverage: it doesn't really exist.