If truth is the first casualty of war, then nuance is a frequent casualty of international reporting. Every so often, at the hands of the big-name media networks of the world that attempt to cover internal conflicts of small, decidedly unsexy nations, nuance dies a particularly slow and painful death.
In the wake of the recent anti-Muslim violence that erupted in the small town of Digana, in central Sri Lanka's Kandy district, international journalists were seen clambering the hills, accompanied by less well-known local stringers.
Much of their coverage focused on the ongoing violence, with some context thrown in for those unfamiliar with the country's complex sociopolitical terrain. To be fair, the nature of breaking news is such that there's only so much airtime or bandwidth a journalist can allocate for the subject, and one cannot fault them for not supplying detailed sociological analysis of the causes.
That said, some nuance is necessary.