Thursday, January 05, 2006
Legacy Media Debacle
I went to bed Tuesday night to this
I woke up Wednesday morning to:
And my first thought was for the families of those miners. I recalled the interview I had seen just before bed of a woman that had just gotten the news her husband was "alive" who had run in her bedclothes, barefoot, to the church. I thought of her joy and expectancy, because she had yet to see her husband, and then I thought how that interview will haunt her for the rest of her life. It dawned on me that the interview had become an act of almost unimaginable cruelty.
Michelle Malkin has her usual great overview of "What Went Wrong".
I am reminded of the now-proven-utterly-false stories of human atrocities in the Superdome in the wake of Katrina. Certainly, this abomination of reporting is born of the same thing. More news distribution than there is product to fill it.
Who do we blame? There are many fingers being pointed at the mining company, but a reporters job is to get information, not pass on that which is handed to him/her. The fact is, in the "average" disaster there is far less news than can possibly fill the kind of wall-to-wall live coverage that we are saturated with these days.
I never have been able to watch it, I check in periodically to see if there is anything new, but then it is on with something else. That was true even on 9/11. Face it, all day there was but 5 minutes of actual fact.
But I appear to be in the minority, the networks do this because people are willing to watch this repetitive newless news. And so, gross tragedies like this one seem almost inevitable, as too many reporters chase too little information to fill the airwaves, and those who control the information succumb to the relentless pressure to answer the repeated questioning, and say something when there is really nothing to say.
In the end, the blame must fall on us the news consuming public. I prayed for the miners, indeed I did, fervently. But their families' hope, joy, and sorrow is theirs, not mine, or anyone else's. At a minimum there should be a moratorium on such interviews for a significant period after any such event. I know many such people go seeking their "15 minutes of fame" - it should be denied them, for they will, as this women no doubt now does, live to regret it, painfully and tearfully so.
Let us, the viewing public, not confuse our sense of empathy with their genuine loss. You may laugh and cry with them as you watch the tube, but you do not help them. Only God can do that in such dreadful circumstances. Let us leave them in peace.
I woke up Wednesday morning to:
And my first thought was for the families of those miners. I recalled the interview I had seen just before bed of a woman that had just gotten the news her husband was "alive" who had run in her bedclothes, barefoot, to the church. I thought of her joy and expectancy, because she had yet to see her husband, and then I thought how that interview will haunt her for the rest of her life. It dawned on me that the interview had become an act of almost unimaginable cruelty.
Michelle Malkin has her usual great overview of "What Went Wrong".
I am reminded of the now-proven-utterly-false stories of human atrocities in the Superdome in the wake of Katrina. Certainly, this abomination of reporting is born of the same thing. More news distribution than there is product to fill it.
Who do we blame? There are many fingers being pointed at the mining company, but a reporters job is to get information, not pass on that which is handed to him/her. The fact is, in the "average" disaster there is far less news than can possibly fill the kind of wall-to-wall live coverage that we are saturated with these days.
I never have been able to watch it, I check in periodically to see if there is anything new, but then it is on with something else. That was true even on 9/11. Face it, all day there was but 5 minutes of actual fact.
But I appear to be in the minority, the networks do this because people are willing to watch this repetitive newless news. And so, gross tragedies like this one seem almost inevitable, as too many reporters chase too little information to fill the airwaves, and those who control the information succumb to the relentless pressure to answer the repeated questioning, and say something when there is really nothing to say.
In the end, the blame must fall on us the news consuming public. I prayed for the miners, indeed I did, fervently. But their families' hope, joy, and sorrow is theirs, not mine, or anyone else's. At a minimum there should be a moratorium on such interviews for a significant period after any such event. I know many such people go seeking their "15 minutes of fame" - it should be denied them, for they will, as this women no doubt now does, live to regret it, painfully and tearfully so.
Let us, the viewing public, not confuse our sense of empathy with their genuine loss. You may laugh and cry with them as you watch the tube, but you do not help them. Only God can do that in such dreadful circumstances. Let us leave them in peace.
