Media Desensitivity
Reporting on Tragedy
So often when we are watching the news a story of tragic proportions will not only be along side of a more mundane one, it will be presented with the same docile tone and care by the reporter giving us the information. This not only is reflected in our attitudes as watchers, readers, and listeners, but it strips the story of its human value.
I am not suggesting on-air emotional breakdowns become standard, but give me something, offer some words of grief, a look, something. Make the 9 year old kid that is watching think about how sad it is that a stray bullet killed a mother of 4 children today in the Bronx; don’t tell him as if you are letting him know the Westminster dog show is rolling into town for the weekend.
We each posses a quality that allows us to forget about the woes of the world and live our everyday lives, and just as we cannot walk through the day crippled by worry, a reporter can’t cry his way through that same report about the Bronx mother of 4, but who looses when a child doesn’t learn life lessons that tragic events can instill because he has a deeply effected sense of tragedy, or because the world has projected to him that they don’t care?
The same fear that prevents media outlets from breaking controversial stories or searching for truth beyond what they are told prevents them from holding some emotional stake in the news they are reporting. This pseudo-professionalism ultimately allows them to be mediocre in there job to properly inform us.
If we can project a sense of compassion and caring in our news reporting we can give the world a sense compassion for one another, a sense of responsibility for one another, and a shared sense of sadness when one of us is touched by tragedy.
The Internet
Violence is not a new creation. Neither is sex or tragedy. What is new is the internet, and the way it introduces us to these things indirectly. We get horrific images without the intensity or emotion they would surely come with if encountered in the first person.
How must a man being beaten look to a child who has seen people get shot on www.killsometime.com, or other sites like it, whose video games are more violent than what he sees, and who has access to nastier things at the touch of a finger on his computer.
This is a serious thing being presented to this kid, but a new standard is taking over where these scenarios are too commonplace to care about, and tragedy is entertainment. The charge is lead by the opportunistic attitude of the media, and is a byproduct of a nature within all of us that needs addressed.
I looked over at my roommates computer screen a couple of days ago and took notice that one third of the screen was devoted to the image of a naked woman bent over putting her finger in her own asshole. The movement was looped and repeating in such an arrhythmic way that it looked inhuman. The middle third of the screen was a freeze frame of a black mans face so badly beaten in a fight that his eye was hanging out of its socket. On the other third he searched for apartments because we are moving March 1. These images where advertisements, pop-ups.
I do not think of my roommate as perverted or bad, he is quite average in these respects which is what makes him a good subject for study. In an instant he was taking in more pornographic and violently shocking visual information than the majority of people ever on the planet did in their entire lives, and so was I.
Inundation
We are simply saturated in media, and really in what media thinks we want, a dumbed down, over sexed, over violent version of our lives. According to, www.mediawise.com, an average American kid watches 4 hours of TV a day, more than any other one waking activity. And if they are an average child watcher, they will witness 200,000 acts of violence, including 40,000 murders on television by the time they are 18.
All of this is leading to a societal movement away from natural human life towards mechanized numbness. Not a thrilling progression, one more likely to resolve like the quiet hum of a computer shutting down then the roar of a man’s voice.
Conclusion
We are desensitized to tragedy, slowly shaping an identity in each of us as an observer, not a participant. We seek tragic and shocking footage to satisfy all while the real tragedy is going on within ourselves, within the dark room where the glowing screen projects anything we could dream up and better, or should I say worse. We are readily turning over what is good and human in us for what is new and shocking. We seem to move at this technological pitch while leaving behind unhandled fundamental issues, only for them to reinvent themselves again and again.
We are special as humans both in our ability to; invent, adapt and build, and in our ability to emote, and share, and use our minds to achieve higher levels of understanding. These two different categories of human capability seem equally impressive and interesting to me, but such a stress has been put on the first group that we, at least in the west, have achieved true imbalance. An imbalance directly represented in the amount of media in front of us, behind us, and in us.
More and more people are becoming aware of these patterns as we continue to question and figure out our own condition. Hopefully this awareness can spark some momentum back towards the middle, towards people learning from other people. After all, that is the true enjoyment of life. A bird does not learn from the trees, it learns from other birds, and that is what makes a bird, a bird. If we continue putting obstacles between ourselves and learning more from electronic screens then from one another, what does that make us?
So often when we are watching the news a story of tragic proportions will not only be along side of a more mundane one, it will be presented with the same docile tone and care by the reporter giving us the information. This not only is reflected in our attitudes as watchers, readers, and listeners, but it strips the story of its human value.
I am not suggesting on-air emotional breakdowns become standard, but give me something, offer some words of grief, a look, something. Make the 9 year old kid that is watching think about how sad it is that a stray bullet killed a mother of 4 children today in the Bronx; don’t tell him as if you are letting him know the Westminster dog show is rolling into town for the weekend.
We each posses a quality that allows us to forget about the woes of the world and live our everyday lives, and just as we cannot walk through the day crippled by worry, a reporter can’t cry his way through that same report about the Bronx mother of 4, but who looses when a child doesn’t learn life lessons that tragic events can instill because he has a deeply effected sense of tragedy, or because the world has projected to him that they don’t care?
The same fear that prevents media outlets from breaking controversial stories or searching for truth beyond what they are told prevents them from holding some emotional stake in the news they are reporting. This pseudo-professionalism ultimately allows them to be mediocre in there job to properly inform us.
If we can project a sense of compassion and caring in our news reporting we can give the world a sense compassion for one another, a sense of responsibility for one another, and a shared sense of sadness when one of us is touched by tragedy.
The Internet
Violence is not a new creation. Neither is sex or tragedy. What is new is the internet, and the way it introduces us to these things indirectly. We get horrific images without the intensity or emotion they would surely come with if encountered in the first person.
How must a man being beaten look to a child who has seen people get shot on www.killsometime.com, or other sites like it, whose video games are more violent than what he sees, and who has access to nastier things at the touch of a finger on his computer.
This is a serious thing being presented to this kid, but a new standard is taking over where these scenarios are too commonplace to care about, and tragedy is entertainment. The charge is lead by the opportunistic attitude of the media, and is a byproduct of a nature within all of us that needs addressed.
I looked over at my roommates computer screen a couple of days ago and took notice that one third of the screen was devoted to the image of a naked woman bent over putting her finger in her own asshole. The movement was looped and repeating in such an arrhythmic way that it looked inhuman. The middle third of the screen was a freeze frame of a black mans face so badly beaten in a fight that his eye was hanging out of its socket. On the other third he searched for apartments because we are moving March 1. These images where advertisements, pop-ups.
I do not think of my roommate as perverted or bad, he is quite average in these respects which is what makes him a good subject for study. In an instant he was taking in more pornographic and violently shocking visual information than the majority of people ever on the planet did in their entire lives, and so was I.
Inundation
We are simply saturated in media, and really in what media thinks we want, a dumbed down, over sexed, over violent version of our lives. According to, www.mediawise.com, an average American kid watches 4 hours of TV a day, more than any other one waking activity. And if they are an average child watcher, they will witness 200,000 acts of violence, including 40,000 murders on television by the time they are 18.
All of this is leading to a societal movement away from natural human life towards mechanized numbness. Not a thrilling progression, one more likely to resolve like the quiet hum of a computer shutting down then the roar of a man’s voice.
Conclusion
We are desensitized to tragedy, slowly shaping an identity in each of us as an observer, not a participant. We seek tragic and shocking footage to satisfy all while the real tragedy is going on within ourselves, within the dark room where the glowing screen projects anything we could dream up and better, or should I say worse. We are readily turning over what is good and human in us for what is new and shocking. We seem to move at this technological pitch while leaving behind unhandled fundamental issues, only for them to reinvent themselves again and again.
We are special as humans both in our ability to; invent, adapt and build, and in our ability to emote, and share, and use our minds to achieve higher levels of understanding. These two different categories of human capability seem equally impressive and interesting to me, but such a stress has been put on the first group that we, at least in the west, have achieved true imbalance. An imbalance directly represented in the amount of media in front of us, behind us, and in us.
More and more people are becoming aware of these patterns as we continue to question and figure out our own condition. Hopefully this awareness can spark some momentum back towards the middle, towards people learning from other people. After all, that is the true enjoyment of life. A bird does not learn from the trees, it learns from other birds, and that is what makes a bird, a bird. If we continue putting obstacles between ourselves and learning more from electronic screens then from one another, what does that make us?
posted by Dr. Fish | 5:09 PM
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