A Media Disaster

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Earth, Japan falls apart. It’s been fascinating, and not always in a good way. It feels like a film. You see the footage on TV and sort of hope that it turns out to be CGI and a banner will come up in a minute announcing a new film coming Summer 2011. But it never does.

There are 20,000 people, two trains and a ship missing, among much else. They’ll never be recovered. It genuinely is the biggest tragedy in recent memory and not something I can comprehend really.

And then we’ve got the nuclear power plants that threaten a meltdown. There are people there who gallantly stayed behind to help control it and these people are receiving more radiation a day than a nuclear engineer receives in his or her entire career. Now that is altruistic heroism. The Japanese are a proud people, doing whatever they can to help their country.

In fact, I read an interesting piece the other day that says in Japan, the stores are not being looted. There is no looting at all coming on from this, or at least, so little that it is negligible to the news and even the media can’t hype it. Many reasons have been thrown about for this, but it usually comes back to the fact that the Japanese are a proud, dignified people. They love their country and for them, the nation comes first.

This isn’t so present across the rest of the world. The hurricane of New Orleans and the floods of England in 2007, for example, led to a spate of thefts from abandoned shops. This is because the attitude of these countries (and others) is one of loving the country, but the self comes first. For the Japanese, such an idea is abhorrent.

I must commend the media on brilliant coverage of the disaster, really bringing it all into our homes. The footage is astounding and this is not something that should be ignored by the rest of the world – this was history in the making, a real game-changer for Japan. It’s not every day that the entire Pacific Rim gets evacuated.

However, the footage is waning, the stories are becoming fewer and as the clean-up operation begins (although I don’t know how – where do you put all the debris?) we will hear less and less of Japan. By the end of next week, the media will have forgotten completely.

This is not uncommon. Think of how the Egyptian riots, the Australian storm and the New Zealand earthquake dominated our screens for days and then, as soon as the worst was over, they vanished and we were back to looking at footage of teenage yobs and David Beckham.

I’m not suggesting that we have to keep focussing on the entire clean-up operations of these countries, and I can appreciate that the news wants to be full of action, and a flood is more dramatic than people building houses. But it would be nice if we could see what was happening next. Currently, it looks like as soon as the disaster proper is over, everything is hunky dory and the reporters leave, but what really happens next? Has Australia recovered? Is Christchurch being rebuilt? What sort of state is Tunisia in now?

The media has many problems, but since there are now channels dedicated to 24 hour news coverage, most of which is completely banal, it might be worth injecting some of the time to the state of the world after the mess comes about.

Just a thought.

Advertisement