Disaster and the Media

The last two weeks have been so odd. The drama of one of the biggest disasters ever to hit the continental United States has been unfolding while I have been, for the most part, away from all media…print, television, internet. Yet, even the limited contact I have had with the outside world has made it obvious that something huge is going on in this country. Or is it?

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate that the New Orleans hurricane/flood is a disaster of biblical proportions. Three hundred years of ignoring the elephant in the backyard, and inexcusably sluggish disaster relief response from a federal agency headed by inexperienced cronies of our good ole boy president, spelled certain doom for the region when the unthinkable actually transpired. The resulting catastrophe has been heart-wrenching, frustrating, frightening, awe-inspiring…running the gamut of human emotion. That roller coaster of sensation which our national media excels at exploiting. And so it has.

I remember the media coverage of 9/11. I recall being transfixed, for days, by the images played over and over and over again on nearly every one of the 150 television channels piped into my home by my satellite TV service. It was addictive…the ultimate gripping TV serial, but it was real life. Sort of. Once immersed in it, I couldn’t tear myself away. I lived and breathed the demise of the twin towers, over and over, like some nightmarish acid flashback. And the talking heads who hashed, re-hashed, triple- and quadruple-hashed every miniscule aspect of the story. Fabricated some, and embellished others, after the real news had been talked and analyzed to death. Such are the fruits of the twenty-first century 24-hour news cycle.

Tapping into journal land on those few hit-and-run excursions I could manage between August 26 and today, I saw that same scenario played out in the lives of many j-landers. They were saturated with the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and contiguous areas of the Gulf Coast. Appalled, grief-stricken, indignant, shocked…they hung on every word, every image presented to them by our valiant national news media. To the point where people began popping more zanax, or throwing back another shot or two of Jack Daniels, just to be able to sleep at night with the images of destruction, despair and outrage that filled their heads and their hearts.

So I have to ask…how much is enough? At what point does responsible news reporting become media exploitation? Given the 24-hour news cycle, it seems that point would be reached damned early on in any crisis, and anything above and beyond that point is gratuitous. Why does an image have to be aired, a sound byte need to be repeated, every fifteen minutes from dawn to dusk? It could be argued, I suppose, that the 24-hour news gurus are aiming at catching people who tune in to the news at whatever hour of the day or night. Possible. But the more frequent by-product of the all-out media blitz is that hapless citizens get caught up in the drama, and end up subjecting themselves to the almost subliminal effect of the constant barrage of re-run information. They flounder in the tide of old, repetitive news trying to access the carefully controlled trickle of fresh facts. Or inadvertently swallow toxic doses of the ad nauseum dissection of old facts when new ones fail to present themselves within a convenient time frame.

I went through the whole day today without turning on the television, tuning in the radio, or clicking on any of the news links as I navigated past the AOL Welcome Screen to get to the journals I wanted to read. I just did not want to hear (read) it. I felt that, while being nearly disconnected from the world during this crisis, I have heard and seen just enough to give me the information I need: Something very bad happened, and there are people out there suffering because of it. The best and only thing I can do with that information is to let it spur me to some kind of action…let it inspire me to reach out and give what I can, help where I can, comfort when I can. I don’t want to let in enough of the hyper-coverage of the disaster to inspire impotent, destructive emotions…anger, hatred, impatience, outrage. Where can I really go with those emotions? What could I expect them to do besides burn a painful hole in my soul…a hole that would sap my energy to accomplish anything positive? Like stepping out to help the victims. Like bridging a political gap in order to work for a common goal. Hands that are occupied holding up pointing fingers are not available for lending toward the work that needs to be done.

I only wish our shamelessly profit-driven national media would get it. Get that they are not helping…that they are, in fact, daily adding fuel to the fires of animosity; jamming crowbars into the cracks in our national unity, and yanking with all their might. And for what? A few more points in the Nielsen’s? Another million in advertising revenue? One more feather in the cap of an industry-leading news director? For this, they are pushing our nation to the edge of the abyss.

I suspect that, somewhere in the middle of the last century, the technology available to spread news caught up to our ability to absorb it. In that golden wink-of-an-eye in history, good hard news, with a minimum of added crap, was readily available to most anyone in a civilized society. In the "olden days," when news traveled only as fast as a horse, a boat, or a walking man could manage, it became distorted, embellished, and contaminated by the time it was disbursed as far as it could go. These days, news doesn’t happen fast enough to fill all the ticks of the 24-hour news cycle. And, in the down-time, facts get…distorted, embellished, and contaminated. How far have we really come? And where do we go from here?