This is a large topic I would like to write more on later, but will start here. I just spent a week interviewing locals in Minami Sanriku – one of the many towns on the east coast of Japan severely affected by the recent March 11 earthquake and tsunami. The town is nearly all destroyed and half of its population is either missing or dead. The crises is on going and the town is struggling to build again from what looks like Armageddon.
When a disaster such as this has been squeezed dry of everything sensational, media reporting recedes very quickly and soon stops in its entirety. Because of the trust we have established with our favorite news sources to always convey everything relevant, once reporting stops, we are made to feel the crises itself has also receded. This is the paradox of keeping up with the media – while it brings us an awareness of some new events, in the long term it creates an unawareness of most events. Traditional media has no interest in the majority of conflicts and crises occurring throughout the world. At least not over more sensational events. Why for example report more on Strauss-Kahn’s sex case than on Saudi Arabia’s on-going exploitation of migrant workers? Wouldn’t an actual crises be addressed if the latter received the same space dedicated to trivial stories such as that of Strauss-Khan’s?
Papers like the New York Times and the Economist present us with an illusion that they know everything important going on around the world, but because of limited time and space, they can only curate a fraction of things. The truth is the opposite – they only have an awareness of a fraction of things. These papers and other media maintain loyalty through an appearance of possessing worldly knowledge – not actual knowledge of the world.
Minami Sanriku four months after an earthquake and tsunami:
