Sensationalism and how NPR completely missed the point
January 19th, 2010 • chatter
As you all know, Port-au-Prince got hit by an earthquake last week. It was devastating and heavily destroyed the city. The Western media has spent the last 7 days showing non-stop images of the area and reported on it ceaselessly. Why? Mostly because Americans believe there isn’t anything else going on in the world and they — the media — know we love sensationalist pieces. I’ve been so put off by this I haven’t bothered actually keeping up with any developments about what’s going on. It’s not that I don’t care the people on the ground, it’s that I don’t care about what’s being reported because, aside from this earthquake, what’s coming out of Haiti is the same story for the last twenty or thirty years.
However, there’s a new kid in town: gigabytes, and probably terabytes, of images relating to the disaster plastered all over the news, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, and who knows where else. I’ve looked at what’s been posted at Boston.com out of curiosity. Mind you, not morbid curiosity, but sheer curiosity of what’s going to be posted. I wanted to be greeted with images of people being helped but instead all I got where above-ground mass graves, people being crushed, and people in the hospital. This is what I’ve got a problem with. Everyone in the world knows this has happened, we all know people have been injured and have died, but we also know that there’s been a huge surge of UN and rescue forces dropped into Port-au-Prince to help. Where are the images of those people, helping to clear away the rubble, devastation, and piles of bodies? Nowhere to be found it seems.
Then I read the following article from NPR about disaster photography helping to dull our sensitivity to such issues. The author questions when photos of a disaster go from informative to sensationalist. That’s easy to figure out: when every photograph is of devastation and nothing else. There are scant photographs of the doctors, search and rescue techs, military personnel, and even Haitians helping out. It’s all dead bodies and crumbled buildings. This is when reporting is nothing more than sensationalism. Garsd then goes to question how this occurred and while I agree that six Saw movies have helped to dull our collective senses, the blame lies squarely at the media for not only showing minute after minute of this but actively promoting and pushing it into our faces.
This “new” genre of “gore pornography” has been around for decades now. Horror movies latched onto this back in the days of grindhouse and the Internet certainly was awash in it in the 90s. It’s nothing new, it’s just new to the media. The NPR article fully misses the point that we as humans didn’t naturally become desensitized to images of decomposing bodies, we had media outlets shove them down our throats. While scanning Reddit the other day, I had the displeasure of seeing a picture of a small child being tossed, literally, onto a growing pile of bodies. For the first time in years, I was actually disgusted by this. Not because of the image itself, but because someone was there to take an entirely unnecessary photograph and by the gutless media outlet that published it.
Jasmine Garsd and NPR miss the point of why this happens and don’t bother to look in the mirror. She also offers up the quaint tidbit that she “people who have told me they never donated money to a cause before”, therefore letting all the readers know she is acquainted with some pretty selfish individuals. Thank you for letting everyone else know your friends are just a little bit “better” than the rest of us.