Proximity and Proportionality in our Media
A not-so-original rant on the mainstream media:
By now, I’m sure that everyone has heard of the tragic shootings at Fort Hood. My thoughts and emotional reactions to the shootings have probably already been summarized more quickly and more eloquently by some other blogger so I’ll spare you those. I don’t want this blog to be an aggregator site. But I would like to scrawl my thoughts on the media coverage of the shootings (someone’s probably already done this as well):
Let me be clear, the shootings on 05 Nov were a tragedy. They are absolutely horrible; 13 people are dead and many more families are shattered. But I think that they have been accorded a disproportionately large ownership of the media cycle. On 08 Nov, floods and mudslides in El Salvador killed as many as 160 people. Here’s a look at the Google Insights comparison of news searches for the Fort Hood shootings and the mudslide in El Salvador:
Note that I’ve been very generous to the mudslide, counting “El Salvador” OR “mudslide” OR “flood” OR “mud” as valid searches. Conversely, I’ve been very restrictive to the shootings, counting only “Fort Hood” as a valid search. Even with these odds stacked against the shootings, and even considering the proportionality of suffering and the recency of the mudslide, the shootings still dominate the web interest. Similarly, lets compare the 25 Oct suicide car bombings in Iraq, which killed at least 155 and wounded 500, to the 26 Oct Afghan helicopter crashes that killed 14 American soldiers:
Not quite as dramatic, but the Iraq line still doesn’t get above the Afghanistan line during the period of interest.
Editorial Note: I have very little pride of ownership on these Google Insight searches. These are not, by any stretch of the imagination, comprehensive representations of media interest and I invite anyone with a Lexis membership to supplement my findings or prove me wrong.
But the point is, American suffering garners much more media attention than international suffering (see this cartoon from 2003 for a humorous take). Now I know that some of you are saying “Adam come on, it’s natural to feel more for the stories that take place closer to home.” And you’re right. It is natural. And so are rape and hurricanes but that doesn’t mean they’re good.
Okay that was also tongue-in-cheek. But the point is that the news should be about extending our emotional and cognitive borders. It should make us better citizens by bringing us the stories of people from outside our daily lives and familiar confines. The public is a child playing peek-a-boo. We lack object permanence. We really think that misery disappears when we can’t see it. But the truth is that we can’t make the world better by closing our eyes and empathy should have no such understanding of proximity. So please news people, spare me the solipsism and the interviews with Hasan’s cousin’s lawyer and tell me something I don’t know.
13 Nov 09 at 7:24 am
It may be better to use the “Growth relative to the News & Current Events Category” chart instead (click on the chart in my post to go to the Google Insights page and then select the “Growth relative to…” tab. These charts will show positive or negative growth relative to the entire news category from the start date of the graph. In our cases, you can see that both the shootings and the helicopter crash have positive growth rate while the mudslide and the car bombing never break zero in growth rate during the period of interest.
22 Nov 09 at 10:33 am
Adam,
I feel that it is in my curmudgeonly, contrarian nature to offer a slight rebuttal. I think in several regards, this is somewhat an unfair comparison. Most important, is the fundamentally different types of the stories. The Fort Hood shooting was, by nature, a story that was going to grow and attract increasing amounts of attention and interest. Because the the shootings were man-made, inevitably the media and we the news consumers would want to know more about the perpetrator. Once his identity, with its obvious political and cultural cache, became known, everyone was naturally going to speculate on the possibility of conspiracy, his motives, his precise background, etc. With the mudslide, the “culprit” was God, gravity, precipitation, whatever. Nothing more could be learned about motivations or causes. Fundamentally, I don’t think it was a story that could grow.
Additionally, and unfortunately, the media for the most part is a capitalist enterprise driven by market forces. As you pointed out, people will seek out what piques their interests and the media will respond accordingly. It can be argued that the media shapes tastes but as a lot of people note the rise of Web 2.0 can be seen as reaction to traditional media not really accommodating viewer interests and consumers consciously choosing new media. It seems to me thought that a lot of the new internet news formats offer even less content and far more unabashedly subjective perspectives.
Lastly, I think it takes a special type of person to consider and seek out suffering that does not personally pertain to us. They are the exception rather than the rule and consequently the news accommodates the masses.
This is all a long-winded, incoherent (since spending so much time study Urdu, I have lost the ability to writing cogently in English) way of saying that, I agree with you, news coverage should reflect the proportionality of an event. However, given general consumer tendencies and the economic framework of the news media, this is unlikely to change…Unless the Revolution comes and my special Nick’s State News Service (NiStaNewS!) is implemented.
But I certainly share the frustration and the resentment. Write on.
27 Nov 09 at 11:48 pm
[...] It’s easy to see that this topic would be more interesting to read. Two days later, I wrote a post on the media coverage of the Fort Hood shootings. I completely understood that it was not as [...]