Colonial remnants

I'm kinda fascinated with this focus of the media on the Italian quake relative to several other similar disasters since I've been blogging. A Peru quake a couple years ago that killed 300 comes to mind, or that hideous quake in Bam, Iran that killed 20,000+, not to mention flooding, mudslides, and storms that have killed hundreds at a time in India, Bangledesh, Central America, etc.

The standard cited explanation is the media's "missing white woman" syndrome which is usually attributed to racism.

However, I'd like to propose that it's more parallel to a colonial worldview. It's not so much that that the victims share "our race," but that their material lives are much more similar to ours. They were killed in structures that resembled ours, with cars, and modern media communications....

I mean, we expect the poor in their ramshackle huts to die.... They're like "natives."

Am I making sense?