This lethal peepshow

Journalistic values are often revealed by attitude to foreign news. American television, for example, generally covers few events outside the states, and is even wary of giving airtime to wars fought by America overseas. And, as a rough rule, broadsheet papers will have four or five foreign pages, while red-tops allocate one or fewer.

Unusually, though, this week's Sun front pages have alternated between two foreign stories: the Burmese cyclone and the Austrian cellar scandal. Similar news judgment has been shown by most media organisations here and even in the United States, where the apprehension about events not directly involving Americans has been suspended, although perhaps more for the Austrian family than the dead in Burma. Yet a global village of news is creating not worldwide concern, but voyeurism, notes Mark Lawson.

Because the most common critique of national media is parochialism, this expansiveness of interest could be seen as an occasion for celebration. Traditionally, populist newspapers and broadcasters have applied a version of their attitude to the employment market and immigration to stories from far-flung parts: British stories for British readers. In contrast, the more expensive end of the news stand has implied a moral duty to be globally aware: no reader is an island.

Underlying both these approaches, however, is a judgment of relevance to the consumer several time-zones away. Mass-market outlets have favoured tales that have a direct effect on their consumers (prices, strikes, bombs, celebrities), while niche media prefer stories which, while directly irrelevant to their audience, are argued to make us better people for knowing about them. Widespread coverage of the 2008 American election, for instance, can be defended by either measure, as the participants are famous and the winner may preside over a recession or invasion that will significantly shape British days and the lives of almost everyone in a single-superpower world.

But by no imaginable checklist, other than gruesome prurience, is there any need for us to know so many details of what happened in Herr Fritzl's underground dungeon. Marshall McLuhan - the Canadian academic who prophesied the idea of the "global village", but died two decades before the web and 24-hour news proved his remarkable prescience - hoped that the collapse of boundaries would create a kind of universal human concern, in which, while looking at everyone else, we would also look out for them. But when an Austrian family tragedy becomes home news in the US and the UK, it can seem that the interchange of information has created not worldwide concern but global voyeurism.

The point of journalism is not just to show, but to tell: to explain what is going on. And yet the cellar story - and even the cyclone - are most likely to induce a feeling of impotent bewilderment in viewers. These are stories that can not be accommodated by any theory of god or government. In both cases, I have felt guilty about tuning in to such despairing data. The Austrian material made me wonder if a cinema-style system of age certification may soon have to be introduced for news.

At least the Burmese coverage has an effect beyond a lethal peepshow in the appeals for western charitable cash that are already appearing amid the coverage. This arrangement feels right: a sort of licence-fee for having witnessed this pain in a place that it usually ignored. The risk is that Austria and Burma - or future nations struck by flood or a psychopathic paterfamilias - become of interest simply because of the horrible fascination of their narratives, becoming genres in a schedule of entertainment: real-life horror and disaster movies. At worst, the media may become a version of British high street cuisine over the last 40 years, in which burgers and fish and chips have given way to a UN of food. And so readers of newspapers or viewers of TV news become internationalist snackers, feeding their morbid hunger with Chinese one day, Burmese the next, even occasionally prepared to give Austrian a go if it's really spicy stuff.

And concern for these countries is unlikely to become a habit as common as curry or chow mein. In the last few decades, Austria has appeared in the international media only with regard to men hiding young women in cellars and the possibility that certain of its politicians might be Nazis, with the two sorts of stories now linked by commentators who argue that the forms of Austrian notoriety are linked, with some of the country's men acting out a kink planted by the use of underground bunkers by both the Nazis and those hiding from them. This line of thought is clearly tempting, although most Britons would be unhappy if they switched on the television in Vienna to see a pundit using Fred West as an exemplar of the national attitude to family and sex.

McLuhan used the image of the world becoming a village because he wanted a metaphor for a community in which everyone knows each other's business. But, even in such a place, it's possible to get a reputation as a busybody or gossip. As long as we're rattling the charity tins, staring over the fence at drowned Burmese is fine. But, when it comes to the Austrian monster, sometimes, in the global village, we should mind our own business.