Media and massacre
April 17th, 2007 | Published in Current Events, Television, Technology | 6 Comments
The media loves massacre. If they don’t, they sure send mixed signals.
I wasn’t planning on saying anything about the Virginia Tech shooting, but then I read what Justin at Radical Congruency wrote about the media’s exploitation of the “Massacre of Virginia Tech.”
Like Justin, I find the media’s handling of such issues appalling, which is why I rarely watch TV news. Everything is made into entertainment. The media does not respect the dead, but rather profit from them and exploit them. It’s like today’s quote from Wendell Berry: “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love.” The media sees only value in death, thus exploiting those who have fallen.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. I probably am. But this is not the first time it has happened. Think of Columbine or 9-11 or plane crashes. I first realized this during 9-11, when they played the videos of the towers being hit over and over and over again. It felt like propaganda. I had to turn it off. But, oh, how the media lives for such moments! The world is watching, and they want to see it again and again. They don’t want to think; they want to feel. And feeling is where TV news excels.
(If you are interested in understanding this phenomenon further, the best two books I’ve read on the subject are Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) and Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961).)
April 17th, 2007 at 1:03 pm (#)
I am in complete agreement. I can’t watch any T.V. news anymore. All it is is irrational fear-mongering and exploitation of violent events.
April 18th, 2007 at 8:11 am (#)
Quote:
Perhaps I am being too harsh. I probably am.
/Quote
No. No, you’re not. It’s bread and circuses, MSNBC style.
April 18th, 2007 at 10:55 am (#)
Joshua,
In agreement with Esau, you are not being too harsh. I think you are correct in your estimation of the news media. I too was turned off with the television news reports. The night of the tragedy there was an hour long special on one network channel. That very night!! Before anything was really known!! I believe it was disrespectful to those involved and more about preying on people’s curiosity to gain profits than to tell the news.
kevin
April 19th, 2007 at 12:02 am (#)
Thanks for the link. Boorstin and Postman are both brilliant, though I haven’t read that book of Boorstin’s (I’ve been trying for ten years to get through The Discoverers, and it’s fascinating, though I always seem to put it away before getting very far). I’ve read everything of Postman’s, and he’s right on target when it comes to media.
I have a friend who majored in TV production, and he told me one day “The purpose of all media is to attract an audience for advertisers.” That’s not much of a surprise when it comes to sitcoms and other shows that explicitly exist for entertainment purposes, but it’s highly disturbing when they are using the death of our fellow humans to increase ratings.
At the same time, I’m complicit. I watched Nightline for the first time ever, and while we’re not a Nielsen household, I’m sure their ratings do go up during times of tragedy. They offer a public service, but it’s also entertainment, and sometimes that mixed purpose is unpalatable.
On a different level of complicity, I have ads on my blog (or rather, Amazon book links). If I blog about a hot news topic, and get more traffic and ultimately more revenue, I’m doing the same thing as the TV networks. What’s the way out?
Thanks for your thoughts.
April 19th, 2007 at 9:47 am (#)
Justin,
It must be something about The Discoverers — I’ve been trying to finish it for over a year! I keep putting it down as well. I find the history fascinating, but it must be boring me, because I can’t keep reading it like most other books.
The Image isn’t like that. I was able to finish it easily and found it very enlightening, much like Postman’s book. (I actually heard of it first through Postman.)
That’s an interesting point about making revenue from ads on your blog. But I think that’s a completely different thing. You are not turning this massacre into entertainment for your readers. You are not designing logos and getting in the face of those who were just hurt and asking inappropriate questions of them. You are not milking every last angle of the story. And they’re doing it for the ads; you’re not.
That is, you are not “doing the same thing as TV networks,” anymore than a church does the same thing as a business because it collects money.
That’s my perspective, anyway.
Josh
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:07 am (#)
Hi Josh,
Thanks for the thoughtful response. As I listened to NPR yesterday, I was struck by how tasteful and honoring their stories on the massacre were. The people they interviewed were having their stories told, not being exploited. With this presentation, it becomes a human interest piece, not something everyone in America needs to know everything about.
As I watched the coverage on the major TV networks Monday night, I wondered why we should have to know all of these details. At the supermarket today, I could not characterize the cover of People Magazine, featuring a photo of a person who’d been shot being carried by police and EMTs, as anything other than trashy and exploitative.
I suppose there is a substantive difference, but I think both NPR and my blog feed the same underlying interest as the major networks and magazines - the need to know about someone else’s suffering. We can choose to learn about their suffering for our own entertainment (especially, dare I say, the gore factor), or as a chance to reflect on our own mortality and the way we live.
One further note: I found this essay entitled “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics” via BoingBoing - written for 9/11, but equally applicable to the VT shootings.