Can citizen journalism and/or cyber technology raise global awareness?

In the news media today, there are many important news reports that are not hitting the headlines. In our last class, Fischer was talking about how most people know of the Holocaust but barely anyone knew much of the Darfur crisis but why is that? When looking up pictures on the internet for the Holocaust and the Darfur crisis, there is much more pictures of Holocaust than the Darfur crisis. This shows that not many people know about the Darfur crisis because there is not much news coverage. One of the possible reasons that we discussed in our class is that there is not much coverage because it doesnt directly affect us. But looking back in history, not many people knew about the Nanjing Massacre either. I just did a google image search on the Nanjing Massacre and there were a lot of pictures but still, no one knew much about it. For me, I only knew about it because I was in an Asian Studies class in my freshman year. But before that, I never knew something this horrible even existed. In 1997, there was a best selling non-fiction book called The Rape of Nanking which the author, Iris Cheng, gathered research through American soldier's and missionaries' accounts in the massacre. This started to inform the readers in Western countries about the massacre that was forgotten. This book has also led to a documentary about the Nanking Massacre because more people were aware of it. But before this book, only China and perhaps a few nearby Eastern countries knew about it. It shows that Western countries did not know about it because it did not directly affect them compared to Eastern countries or the primary victim, China. In Japan, the Nanking massacre is not even mentioned in any of their news, books, or even the textbooks used in school as they are trying to erase their ugly. Also, many Japanese believe that the Nanjing Massacre never existed either. The lack of coverage has led to debates of whether the Nanjing Massacre existed and many have debated that there were a lot of fabrications in many of the accounts. With Nanjing Massacre resulting in more than 300,000 victims, more coverage is needed for Darfur to make more people aware of this so the crisis can fully end.

Sources:
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York, NY: Basic, 1997. Print.
Jones, Adam. "Gendercide Watch: The Nanjing Massacre." Gendercide Watch - Main Page. 1999-2002. Web. 16 Nov. 2010. .