Tell them goodbye: trapped victims’ last words
This was the headline at the bottom of the front page of the weekend Sydney Morning Herald. It was accompanied by pictures of a woman who died in the Minneapolis (USA) bridge collapse and a woman whose husband died.
The article was ‘continued on page 15′. I duly turned to p15 and scanned the rest of that article and the other one about the structural/engineering reasons for the collapse. Together they took up over half the first page of World news. There were another two photos.
I quickly glanced at the World Focus section, with its four little one-paragraph items. Here I read that “at least 100 people were killed and dozens injured when a freight train jumped the tracks in the Democratic Republic of Congo” on Thursday.
Freight train, eh? Does that mean that the majority of the at-least-100 people killed were not on the train? Were passers-by? Villagers? In the wrong place at the wrong time? Or was the train packed with people hanging out the doors? [Yes, a search informs me that many of the dead were probably "clandestine passengers" or "stowaways".]
I guess we’ll never find out what their last words were.
“When you kill one it is a tragedy, when you kill ten million it is a statistic”. – Stalin.
Add that to the fact that there’s a conversion rate in the worth of a human life when it comes to comparing American to African lives. Just look at media coverage of Jon Benet Ramsay’s disappearance compared to the child soldier issue surrounding diamond mining.
And your average punter would be forgiven for having no idea about the 20 million people displaced by floods in India and Bangladesh.
Is it just laziness on the part of news organisations? Plucking this stuff off the wire services or whatever? It’s not just the tragedies, it’s the oddest US stuff that gets big coverage here. Sometimes I get the feeling the minute details of, say, the weather in California, are expected to be as important to us as the weather in Sydney.
It’s all very curious. I’m not even sure a similar bridge disaster in the UK would get the same coverage here. It possibly would, but I’m not 100% certain it would.
The fact is that the average Aussie readily identifies with white Americans who live basically the same lifestyle, as opposed to blacks whose lifestyle we can barely comprehend.
Additionally:
- The last words would have been in an incomprehensible language.
- There’s no photos.
- There’s way less reporters in Congo to cover the story.
- The victims are undocumented and have weird names.
- A bridge falling down in America is very rare because the quality of the infrastructure is much higher. Shoddy infrastructure is standard in Africa.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, 25 dead Americans is an objectively bigger deal than 100 dead Africans. The average American has vastly more human capital than the average African due to 13 years of K-12 education plus a 40% chance of having a graduate degree.
The average American will produce much more than 4X an African’s product over the course of their lives.
The average American will also live a lot longer than the average African, and in much better health.
So calm down, there are good reasons for the media coverage. Either way, getting outraged won’t help the situation.
Kieran, I have recently been in group discussion with young Australians in which some talk as if we have capital punishment here. They seemed to be confused as to any distinctions at all between us and the US.
The fact is that the average Aussie readily identifies with white Americans who live basically the same lifestyle, as opposed to blacks whose lifestyle we can barely comprehend.
Sam P, you assume that the people who died in Minneapolis were white.
And why refer to the people in the Congo by the colour of their skin?
Many of the Minnesota victims appeared to be Hispanic.
Maybe tragedy lightens complexion.
Pictures do drive coverage.
And don’t forget that a story like this in the US can be depended upon to have a trajectory. There will be commissions, hearings, court cases and many photogenic tears to come.
When Africans die, no one cares, including other Africans.
Suz
PUHLEEZ! Of course young people speak that way, because we are civilisational cousins of the US. Starving black Africans are not.
Really, JG? I wonder where African Americans came from.
I dont see the connection to moral relativism…the US is the centre of the world’s media. It’s no suprise that any event there will get 100x more coverage than it would it any other country.
Our interest in any news story is directly proportional to our ability to relate to it. The further an incident is removed—geographically or socially—the less interest it arouses in an audience.
The moral argument about whether we should be as concerned about any tragedy regardless of who was involved or where it happened is a different matter altogether.
If my nephew breaks his arm, I’ll care far more about his situation than I will about any number of dead people completely unlike him in a country I have never visited. This is not because I’m heartless, but because the milk of human kindness tends to flow first to one’s kith and kin, and next to their nearest analogues.
Remember how the young black man, Ryan ‘Stack’ Clark, killed first by the Virginia Tech shooter, had his smiling visage plastered all over the world media? His ‘popularity’ – albeit in death – had everything to do with being a high achieving, middle class American with a 4.0 average in vet science. It had nothing to do with race. White farmers murdered in Zimbabwe attract little more attention than the dead train passengers in the Congo, and often only as a sidebar to some cricketer’s ‘principled moral stance’ in refusing to tour the country.
The point is simple: we have far more in common with ‘Stack’ than the Zimbabwean farmers or Congolese accident victims. They are nameless; he is not. We can imagine a son going off to university and doing well, or even taking the family dog to the vet to be treated by someone ‘just like him’.
Railing against this perception does nothing; people make connections by means of familiarity and empathetic awareness. That is not likely to change anytime soon.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, 25 dead Americans is an objectively bigger deal than 100 dead Africans. The average American has vastly more human capital than the average African due to 13 years of K-12 education plus a 40% chance of having a graduate degree.
The average American will produce much more than 4X an African’s product over the course of their lives.
The average American will also live a lot longer than the average African, and in much better health.
Sam P, that 25 Americans leave behind more material goods than 100 dead Africans is not, “objectively” (whatever that is), a big deal.
These are both news stories which could be written to tell us a lot about the USA as a nation and the Congo as a nation as well as about their place in the world. The story about the US and its failing infrastructure is not rosy by any means. Neither, of course, is the story about the Congo.
Reduced to the “human interest” component, the implication that Americans are intrinsically of more interest to us implies that Africans are intrinsically less human than Americans – and than us.
Our interest in any news story is directly proportional to our ability to relate to it.
And our ability to relate to it is directly proportional to how it is written – how many column inches (or cm) are devoted to it, what stories are told about the people involved in it.
Would any reader at all, apart from a Congolese one, have a chance to identify with or be interested on a human level in the Congo train story as told by the SMH? Of course not.
The further an incident is removed—geographically or socially—the less interest it arouses in an audience.
Prove that.
‘Foreign Correspondent’ has done pretty well over the years telling stories about remote places which are extremely socially different from Australia. Stories about the weird denizens of the Australian Outback seem to go over pretty well in the European media. I personally have never been to Russia but have been interested in many films and documentaries and novels set there.
I mostly agree with skeptic, but her example of the Zimbabwean farmers is a very poor one. Almost everybody in Oz knows about the plight of the farmers and this is because they are white yet we no almost nothing about many other conflicts in Africa.
Even the ABC’s farming program Landline has done a couple of stories on their plight. Yet there is correspondingly little interest in the conflicts that occur in Africa between, let’s say, the Bantu and non-Bantu groupings.
“Kith and Kin” very obviously extends to skin colour. It is naive or disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
Of course young people speak that way, because we are civilisational cousins of the US.
We’re much more civilisational cousins of Canada than we are of the USA, yet people here don’t get confused about that.
(And I wouldn’t use the word “civilisational” in relation to capital punishment.)
Sam P, that 25 Americans leave behind more material goods than 100 dead Africans is not, â??objectivelyâ?? (whatever that is), a big deal.
It’s about providing services that other humans value. Healthy productive lives are more valuable than diseased idleness.
If you deny this then YOU are the moral relativist.
SL, feeling empathy is very much driven by what we read and see and how the media constructs a narrative for us to enter into. This is why “Stack’s” story is familiar. His story was part of a narrative which concerned the west. Which is why the sons of privilege are picking up guns and blowing peoples brains out en masse.Picking out token Blacks whose story has fed into this does not prove your point. Around the same time of the Virginia Tech massacre a bomb blast killed countless more people in an Iraqui university. But we didnt get any stories about that. No pictures of shiny students on the brink of success. Why? There are many journos in Iraq. Choices are being made over what narratives to privilege. Race very much does have something to do with it. Disaster stories in the West are continually given space and detail over disaster stories from Africa or the Middle East. Society and its media are making these choices and those choices feed into a discourse of privileging western society’s concerns and erasing the realities of Africa and the Middle East. The discursive reasons why these choices are made is what is at issue. Not whether these choices are made, or whether it is natural that these choices are made. It seems to me, then, that there is nothing at all ‘natural’ about the motivations of the western reporting and continual elisions of the humanity of Africans in its reporting.
I’m sure by a purely journalistic standards they do an admirable job but challenged to prove their interest level we could use—I don’t know—ratings. Using that measure I’d wager they wouldn’t hold a candle to some of the more ‘familiar’ human interest stories offered elsewhere.
Some of those bridge victims were kids.
They’ve never produced anything.
They probably spent much of their waking hours watching execrable television.
I’m glad there’s been little coverage of them. I’d feel cheated.
Hmmmm.
And how many column centimetres are devoted to it is directly proportional to how much interest (the editors perceive) the audience to have in it.
Steve, do you know any of their names? That is my point. They do, I grant you, have the advantage of a common sporting link (cricket), but even so it is Stuart MacGill or Monty Panesar who is the focus of the story, not any individual farmer or democracy activist. Without the famous sportsman, they really would be on the back page with the vice-regal notices – and the Congolese accident victims.
I find this post interesting because it strikes me as railing against something that will never change. Americans – of whatever race – are more interesting to us because they are more like us; we see ourselves in them and find their stories interesting. Somehow directing Australia’s – or the world’s – media to report more on the third world (impossible, anyway, the press is not state-owned, one of the few things to commend it) would merely result in a drop in circulation, shortly followed by a drop in advertising revenue, shortly followed by a drop in share price.
It amazes me that we persist in seeing media bodies as somehow different from other corporations. They exist to sell things. You may object to that, which is fine, but do not expect organisations designed to turn a buck to somehow be all things to all men. They are all things to their stockholders, their board of directors and the relevant sections of the Corporations Law. And that’s it.
Yeah maybe. I don’t have the time or inclination to do any research but I suspect that a lot of Australians yearn to be part of the USA … or assume that they already are in a cultural kind of way. Perhaps it’s related to the pathological compulsion to have a Great and Powerful Friend, who knows. I just checked the UK edition of the BBC News site … not a mention of bridges falling down in the USA until you go the ‘Americas’ section.
That’s funny Ken; I just checked the ABC News website and neither do they. Doesn’t really support your inference that Australians are America-Centric then, does it?
The bridge collapsed on Wednesday/Thursday. I hardly think looking at the front page of internegt news sites today will tell you anything useful about the interest it generated.
Its not on the front page of the NY Times today either. OMG! Americans don’t care about…. themsleves!
Healthy productive lives are more valuable than diseased idleness.
Gee, here we are in Racist Stereotypes for Beginners.
Healthy
Seen Sicko or Fast Food Nation?
Diseased
Presumably you mean HIV/AIDS, a disease unknown in the USA.
[In case it's not clear, I'm being sarcastic.]
It would be an interesting exercise if a story like the Congo train crash, (which I too noticed was a mere blip compared to the “OMG, Americans are dead and dying out there”, bridge collapse story, which as we know was attributed to dodgy maintenance on the part of money-grubbing,-”so-a-few-people-die/we’ve-got-insurance/we’ll-make-more money-if-we-spend-none”, private contractors. (Australian engineers uttering ‘us too’s', too, by way, but I digress. If such a story (as the Congo crash) was given proportionally more space in the MSM than an equivalent, simultaneously occurring, and is generally the case, ‘lesser’, USA death and disaster ‘story’. Fly in camera crews, photographers, ace reporters, etcetera. Excruciating to watch, no doubt, and I wouldn’t, but it could change the way we perceive each other as all being relative, rather than merely morally relative.
The MSM is a powerful beast, enormously influential, answerable to no-one feeding on and providing fodder to the lowest common denominator. Is it any wonder it is often perverse, amoral, absurd, sickening and just plain dumb?
Almost everybody in Oz knows about the plight of the farmers and this is because they are white yet we no almost nothing about many other conflicts in Africa.
Well, there is a bloody lot of them to keep up with. You’d need a 24hr live news feed just to know who’s fighting who at any given moment. At least with the white farmers you can safely assume their goals are to keep their land and farm crops, maybe have a little rule of law. I think Katz sums it up best with: ‘When Africans die, no one cares, including other Africans.’
I guess we’ll never find out what their last words were.
Yeah, that really puts the last words of that dying American in perspective. Thanks.
Lefties continually amaze me. Your moral ground is so high that altitude sickness prevents your brains from functioning sometimes.
That’s Psuedo/Soggy left to you Michael! You Objectionable Libertines on the other hand have no morality…….just generalising.
And the MSM knows which food its ‘lowest common denominator’ likes to eat most. These are the people who consume the products their advertisers sell. And the MSM serve their customers the fare they desire. Is there any other way to successfully run a business?
The topic of this post relates to a byline in the SMH; a newspapaer owned by Fairfax Media Limited—a pubicly listed company bound to make money for its shareholders.
It does not make sense to blur the lines between the daily reality of running a media company and your own (probably unattainable and unrealistic) idealogical wish-list.
Small earthquake abrioad, not many dea.
SRC
It amazes me that we persist in seeing media bodies as somehow different from other corporations.
It amazes me that some people persist in denying that the media is a different entity to, I don’t know, pet food or any other commodity. Of course the majority of media is run as a commercial business, but that’s not all there is to it (in most cases). And fortunately for us, due to the influence of our ‘civilisational cousins’ the British, we have two public broadcasting bodies which don’t exist purely to “sell” but which are an important constituent part of the public sphere.
people who lack a conception of common humanity linked to certain unnegotiable values tend also to lack the mental, cognitive and emotional skills necessary to feel empathy with people who live far different lives, even though their suffering may be much worse than those with whom they do feel empathy because of proximity, cultural similarity, nationality, etc.
But to live in such a way, as an individual or a group, eventually mutates into forms of nasty pathological narcissism. It is certainly unsatisfactory (understatement) from ethical, moral, realistic or sustainable perspectives.
The media, political leadership, the conscious shaping of public policy, the law, and the imaginative and illuminative role of the arts can help develop these necessary skills. To the extent that the potential role of all these spheres is undermined, thwarted or denied, then the best we can hope for is that Australians may look in horror at this latest avoidable disaster in the US and think, rightly, with fear and anxiety, but this is the society we most emulate. Why?
The same observation of moral relativism could be made because there was more focus in the recent news on the Minneapolis tragedy than there was on, say, the victims of the Napoleonic wars. The fact that their deaths are separated by a few hundred years does not make any of them less ‘tragic’.
Nor is relative column space devoted to each issue ever a reliable measure of the moral worth of a particular issue.
SL says:
“but even so it is Stuart MacGill or Monty Panesar who is the focus of the story, not any individual farmer or democracy activist”
Rubbish. Cricket has nothing to do with why a program like Landline has run multiple stories on white Zimbabwean farmers but as far as I can tell bugger all on other African farmer issues.
This is also monstrously absurd: “It amazes me that we persist in seeing media bodies as somehow different from other corporations.”
Let me give an anecdote that demonstrates my point. In the lead up to the overthrow of Apartheid, TV news bulletins regularly featured footage of mainly white police fighting black youths. My sister was 3 or 4 years old at the time. I’ll never forget her saying that all black people are bad. I asked her why. She replied: “because they are always fighting white people”. Hardly surprising given the only exposure to black people for a kid in a white bread country town was the media and its overwhelmingly conflict-based portrayals.
The media shapes culture, in often subtle ways, that Kellogg’s Crunchy Nuts and Ikea bathmats don’t.
If you can’t see the difference between media and other corporations it is because you don’t want to.
And your evidence for this assertion is?
There is actually one small – but very significant – difference. It renders media corporations less accountable than Pal or Whiskas, too. It has nothing to do with coercing taxpayers (both Australian and British) into paying for media organisations apparently designed – at least in the case of the BBC – to bash Israel.
Channel 4 leaves the Beeb for dead.
If Whiskas poisons your moggie, you can sue.
Media organisations can poison the worldview of your favourite designated RWDB Keyboard Kommando to their hearts’ content, without possibility of legal redress.
I thought libertarians believed that ideas had power. While I dissent from the notion of a “marketplace” of ideas, it must surely be clear that media corporations do not sell a product in the same way as a supermarket does, but deeply shape what ideas are acceptable, and what constitutes “news” and “opinion”.
The media might be tricky from time to time, but the only people who ‘deeply shape what ideas are acceptable’ are us. These values are what we develop in ourselves as individuals, the media doesn’t thrust them upon us without our choosing. You can always turn the TV off and think for yourself.
Too right that the media doesn’t sell a product the way a supermarket does. Ideas are free and you can discard or accept them at will. Knowledge is no burden to carry. It’s the ultimate free market! Rich and poor can participate equally!
People who do not sufficiently attend to the value of the lives of others are morally incomplete persons whose vision of the human world is skewed.
When W.H. Auden wrote in the late 1930s:
he connected two failures: intellectual obtuseness and that with which it was intimately bound :the freezing of the imagination.
“Pity” he connected with the possibility of an accurate vision of value.
The sequence is important. The freezing of the “seas of pity” is the precursor of “intellectual” – and hence moral – “disgrace”.
“stares from every human face”
Really, Michael?
Your ideas have never ever been influenced by the media? You think everything out for yourself from first principles? Remarkable!
Your ideas have never ever been influenced by the media?
Maybe when I was 10. As an adult of sound mind who can raise kids, drive cars, and vote etc, I definitely would like to believe I’m thinking the important things out for myself. Wouldn’t you?
You think everything out for yourself from first principles?
My morality and political thought definitely comes from first principles. These things are that important that it’s necessary to put in the time and effort to sort them out to this level, in order to become a ‘complete person’ as jinmaro is so fond of saying.
Remarkable!
I don’t think it’s that remarkable. While I’ve been doing it I’ve noticed that lots of people have done it before me, and better than me. You can learn from these people, but you still need to keep your wits about you to sort the good ideas from the bad!
Ironic, isn’t it, that America’s foremost poet, Walt Whitman, depicted himself as identical with the black slave’s body sold at auction, with the woman who hides her gaze behind the shutters of a fine house, with the male who gazes with erotic longing at other male bodies. And that his speaker-voice portrays Christ as his loving comrade, like him a wanderer and an alien.
So your thoughts about the marketplace of ideas are entirely original to you, Michael?
And they don’t reflect an ideological position which could be contested?
I’m not having a go – at least not at you personally, but at the remarkable idea that we’re not at all influenced by anything other than our own reasoning.
No Mark, not all my ideas are original, but I am capable of reasoning through all of them by myself to determine their value. Just like we, being creatures of reason, all can if we really want. Yes, my position can be contested, but they will stand the test of reason, otherwise I wouldn’t hold them. If someone starts from a different viewpoint, say a religious one, or even a secular humanist one that begins with ‘all human life has inalienable value’ then they might find my positon wrong by their values. But I will still demand they justify their starting point which they can’t do.
We are all influenced by a lot of things, our evolution, our primeval urges, how our mothers treated us, the community in which we live, what we saw on the bus on the way to work today etc. But as beings of reason we can all individually test these things to evaluate their worth and morality, and to make objective decisions as to right and wrong.
If we can’t do this then we are nothing more than animals running on instinct and pack behavioiur. I believe humanity is more than that. I believe in the self-sovereignty and inherent worth of each human individual, and their individual right to claim ownership of these qualities, through their ability to make accurate moral decisions.
(And I wouldnâ??t use the word â??civilisationalâ?? in relation to capital punishment.)
Why use semi-literate made-up pseudo-academic jargon for any purpose?
The Beeb is a different kind of organisation. They constantly tell us on radio that they have correspondents everywhere (almost). I think they do pretty well in trying to cover most things and to inform rather than just entertain.
For example if you go to their story on the DR Congo train crash there are links to a number of other stories and to information about DR Congo.
You find a similar treatment when you go to the story about 65 people missing presumed drowned off the coast of Sierra Leone.
Sam P [at 4:05 pm] you said
Which white Americans do you mean? When I was in the United States, so often I heard ordinary regular Americans say “We don’t know people who are like that” or “Never seen anything like that here” or “Hell, don’t believe what you see on TV here”. For them, there was a tremendous gulf between how America was shown by the news media and by Hollywood and their own experiences of life in America.
There are probably a lot more Aussies than is generally supposed who have real empathy for those harmed by disaster, regardless of their race or creed …. but they are denied knowledge of these happenings – other than 3 or 4 column/centimetres on page 99 [sorry, TimT] or a 10-second second-hand “news” snippet slipped in between a colossal story of a celebrity bimbo’s bath habits and a blatant advertorial.
SkepticLawyer, you said
True enough …. but why does the news media here, including the ABC, go out of its way to set that in concrete?
I find it’s usually best to start from wherever you are. It gets confusing if you try to start from somewhere else.
And does the position you start from, Michael, have values? If not why do you choose one value over another? If so, does it not taint your enquiry?
Is`nt this website guilty of the same thing….three threads on DR Haneef none on the current Taliban`s…er policy
Actually, Leigh, no.
We’re in Australia (well, you may not be, but this is an Australian blog), whose government and police were the drivers of the Dr Haneef affair. This affair is something that directly reflects on Australian citizens — ie most of the people who post and comment here — for better or worse. Conversation about the Haneef affair is conversation about our own country, unlike conversation about foreign disasters, whether they happen in Minneapolis or Kananga.
If you are not an Australian, of course, then given the way the press carries on as per suz’s post and given the triumphalist solipsism of the US, you could be forgiven for not being fully aware that Australia is technically neither a state nor a colony of the US.
However, this country was culturally colonised by the US several decades ago and is now for all intents and purposes politically colonised by it as well, which I was assuming was suz’s underlying point.
And some of us don’t like it.
Oh please PC heaps of more ïmportant”things have happened around the world this week but LP have zeroed in on things that are relevent to it`s readers everyone does it it`s human nature.
So from what I can gather, unless there are photos of a tragedy or if it affects the touring schedule of Australia’s cricket team, then Australian media just really isn’t interested. I could only wonder how much coverage the floods in Bangladesh would get if it was blamed for interupting Ricky Ponting’s tour warm up.
I agree with Leigh, despite the typos. This blog inevitably reflects the biases of its writers: it’s not a medium for recording what IS important, it’s a medium for recording what it’s bloggers think are important. No great shame in that, every blog is biased by its writers.
The good thing at least about LP and a few other blogs is that posts like this one at least raise the question of media attention given to various issues and provoke some thoughtful responses and critiques from its readers.
“The media might be tricky from time to time, but the only people who ‘deeply shape what ideas are acceptable’ are us. These values are what we develop in ourselves as individuals, the media doesn’t thrust them upon us without our choosing. You can always turn the TV off and think for yourself.”
I’m also suspicious of a simple media effects model, but I don’t think our values our ours alone any more than our language is ours. These things always precede us. We have an active and creative engagement with them, yes, but they are there before we are even born.
What is offered by the MSM is an imagined national (and international) community, one that most of us participate in, often critically to varying degrees, or with some sense of irony. How we orient ourselves to that content is an open question, but the ‘events’ that become the terrain of our moral orientation are at least partly determined by the media as a system. I don’t think the proliferation of images and content coming from the United States necessarily prevents independent, rational thought, but it determines some of our shared reference points. There is nothing conspiratorial about this, either: the US is a media industry powerhouse, producing enormous amounts of content.
‘are ours’
Pictures and footage determine a story’s importance (even in print media to a surprising extent). The bridge collapse was caught by CCTV, and was immediately surrounded by cameras. If anyone had captured the train crash on tape, it would have got higher billing. I don’t really think the degrees of separation theory is more than a marginal factor. The media work with the material at hand, and 10,000 times more material comes from the US than all of Africa.
We are all influenced by a lot of things, our evolution, our primeval urges, how our mothers treated us, the community in which we live, what we saw on the bus on the way to work today etc. But as beings of reason we can all individually test these things to evaluate their worth and morality, and to make objective decisions as to right and wrong.
Michael, if we don’t even know – as 99% of the Australian population doesn’t re this disaster in the Congo – that certain events are happening in the world, we can hardly evaluate the ‘worth and morality’ of the world we live in with ‘objectivity’ and ‘reason’.
[I mean 'world' here to literally mean the global world. No human is an island - no nation is an island any more either.]
Although in the case of the three Haneef posts, the frequency actually reflected the interest of the commentors rather than the blog authors – once a thread got close to 200 comments we closed it and opened a new one so that the page wouldn’t take forever to load.
Your broader point about blogs reflecting the bias of authors I accept.
sorry, the above was responding to TimT.
I was actually making a legal point, which Mark and Michael S know about but with which others may be less familiar. Media organisations in Australia are exempted from the operation of s52 of the Trade Practices Act, which makes misleading and deceptive behaviour (or behaviour that tends to mislead and deceive) actionable.
Although I am more equivocal than I once was about extending the regulator’s power (the ACCC, in this case) to media corporations, it is an important legal immunity that media bodies often abuse, and accounts for much of the unbalanced reporting that suz highlighted in her original post.
I’ll go back to writing Edinburgh Fringe reviews now
Brian – the position I start from doesn’t have values. Like you say ‘I find it’s usually best to start from wherever you are.’ It’s an accurate objective understanding of our condition. After that we can decide where we want to go. When it comes to choosing one value over the other I apply reason to this emperical assessment to make my choices.
Suz, what don’t you know? You and I both know that thousands die in Africa every day from famine, civil war, accidents and disease. You and I both know the place struggles with rule of law. You and I both know that if there was a freight train it would be full of stowaways. You and I both know that the tracks probably run through the local schoolyard. You and I both know that the moral will or technical prowess to safely run a train is probably absent. I feel I can confidently make an assessment of Africa’s situation without hearing about every disaster. And hearing about every African disaster would be a bit like keeping track of who’s fighting who in civil war today: you’d need a live 24hr news feed just to keep up.
Why the US makes the news, besides the obvious that there is more higher quality material coming out of the US for the media to use, is that they have rule of law, safety standards, and put a high value on human life. We don’t expect bridges in the US to collapse. We do expect bridges in Africa to collapse, and that’s perfectly rational.
As an American, and as a Minneapolis native whose mother drove the I35W bridge to and from work everyday, it’s difficult for me to comment on the pervasive reporting of this disaster overseas. Honestly I’m startled that it would get the sort of coverage Suzoz implies. Here in the States, I get the decided impression that the media (and the President, who swooped down for a photo-op with first responders as soon as possible) were delighted to have something “easy” to report. The human-interest angle holds people’s attention (as a US citizen, I don’t have to explain why that would be the case in our own country, and I’m not qualified to analyze the comparative value of the story elsewhere) — but whether the average American will follow along as some reporters and activitists connect our failing infrastructure to the catastrophe in New Orleans or even to the drastic fiscal crisis we’ve created for ourselves through a very expensive, not to mention immoral, war in Iraq, I highly doubt.
At a visceral level, I wonder whether a story about the rush-hour collapse of a state-built bridge in a developed nation (not to mention the world’s materially richest nation) simply taps into fears many or most of us have entertained while crossing bridges over water. A brakes-failures on an overcrowded train in a region that most of us perceive as profoundly troubled isn’t “surprising” in the same sort of way. The bridge collapse gets under our skin as something unexpected and unnerving; as a group, we’re conditioned (unfairly, I think) to expect transport disasters in Africa.
The question I have would be, what sort of African reporting would break into the story we’ve created about that continent or its various regions. What reporting would startle us enough to pay attention. I think it’s fair to say that this question has worried activists for and in Africa for at least the last thirty years — because globally, we clearly are not paying attention.
“I feel I can confidently make an assessment of Africa’s situation without hearing about every disaster.”
Empiricism is a real pain in the arse, isn’t it? It’s much safer to stick to the stereotypes.
“You and I both know that the moral will or technical prowess to safely run a train is probably absent. ”
This is just ludicrous. What about the lack of resources, of money being put into infrastructure, a political system not beset by outside interference and corruption?
Boiled down to its basics this question can be illustrated by a simple hypothetical scenario:
Two newsboys are selling papers from the same busy (Australian) inner-city position. The first calls out “Train crash in the Congo”. The second yells “Train crash in Coburg (or Cabramatta)”.
Which paperboy will attract the most impulse buyers?
Michael, where I differ is that I don’t believe you can ever be entirely objective and that in applying reason your perceptions and rational processing of information are infused with values, will and desire and make reference to your emotions continuously. The acting subject (you) is hard to define and is in a state of continual flux. So the best of luck with your chop-chop logic. I have to go out and work now and can’t hang around to debate the finer points.
The Congo train crash is a variety of the one-paragraph ‘bus plunge’ story (see here for an entertaining explanation) found under “In Brief” in the International section of all newspapers.
For a one-par bus plunge you need a poorly-documented but fairly substantial loss of life in a place you’ve barely heard of affecting people you will almost certainly never have anything to do with. For every Australian who knows someone in any part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, there will be about 5000 who know someone in Minneapolis or nearby, or has a degree or two of separation from a potential victim. Plus the Minneapolis disaster is superbly documented with spectacular action footage. It’s all about news organisations knowing their markets.
TimT, of course it does. I was making a somewhat different point (which I notice Leigh ignored).
Jody, that’s a brilliant point about tapping into fears. Any ‘OMG this could happen to MEEEE’ -type news item will sell lots of papers.
â??You and I both know that the moral will or technical prowess to safely run a train is probably absent. â??
This is just ludicrous.
Why? I assure you that major airlines struggle with the same problems everyday with regards to maintaining airworthiness, and look at the value we put on human life and the resources they have to call upon.
It’s hardly surprising that these things would fall by the wayside in Africa. Reality is reality. Are you denying that the train tracks don’t run through the schoolyard in Africa (or India, or Arsecrackistan) somewhere? It isn’t a political system ‘beset by outside interference and corruption’ that resulted in this happening. It’s a series of bad choices from within. If we put an injection of funds into that nation which resulted in the diversion of those tracks around the schoolyard within a few years they’d be running through another one. It’s the moral development that makes the difference, and that’s up to the people themselves. Yes, we can help, but we can’t help them if they won’t help themselves. You can’t blame it all on outside influences, Adam.
BTW, I’ve got to earn a living so I may not be able to respond.
“It’s the moral development that makes the difference, and that’s up to the people themselves.”
In other words, ‘morality’ is a handy way of avoiding difficult questions about how people are systematically precluded from ‘good planning’ by poor education, by corruption, by the lack of resources. Each disaster has a history and a material context. Those ‘bad choices’ are only a small part of the story – a symptom as much as a cause. Give them too much weight and you lapse into untenable idealism.
SL:
There is actually one small – but very significant – difference. It renders media corporations less accountable than Pal or Whiskas, too. It has nothing to do with coercing taxpayers (both Australian and British) into paying for media organisations apparently designed – at least in the case of the BBC – to bash Israel.
Channel 4 leaves the Beeb for dead.
The media might not be covered by the Trade Practices Act but they are covered in several other areas of law – media ownership regulations, censorship, libel, advertising standards etc. All of these indicate that the media is a unique entity, not just a commodity.
To describe the BBC as an organisation “designed to bash Israel” is ludicrous.
And Channel 4 is a publicly owned broadcaster too, with public service obligations.
PC:
…the triumphalist solipsism of the US…
“We don’t do bodycounts” General Tommy Franks, Iraq, 2003.
Says it all, really.
I’m late to the dance, but Skepticlawyer was all over this topic in her(?) first post. We care more for those who we have things in common with.
In other words, ‘morality’ is a handy way of avoiding difficult questions about how people are systematically precluded from ‘good planning’ by poor education, by corruption, by the lack of resources.
Adam, regardless of how much you want to attribute to poor choices and how much to misfortune (and I know your ilk would love to attribute everything to misfortune and nothing to personal responsibility!) the first step in fixing the problem is for each individual to decide to make correct moral choices. When put into action this will result in increases in rule of law, productivity, human rights, peace and prosperity, which will go a long way to solving the problems you have listed. It will also go a long way to providing opportunities and eliminating the ‘misfortunes’ like railway tracks running through schoolyards.
Is it inconceivable to you that perhaps Africans are already in a morally consistent position with people in our own society? See, I don’t put much stock in morality as a cause of anything, and I don’t think it is particularly important as an explanatory device. I do see it as a handy justification, though, for turning your back on your own complicity.
Misfortune is another lovely term that suggests that the problems that beset Africans are, in some sense, outside of human agency. But this miscasts my argument, which is that every disaster has a history and a material context. There is nothing ‘unfortunate’ about it: there are perpetrators, there are beneficiaries, there are victims. Your argument is that the perpetrators are the victims in a useful (for us in the developed world) moral circle that never reaches beyond the immediate context of the disaster. I think this is naive, at best.
Is it inconceivable to you that perhaps Africans are already in a morally consistent position with people in our own society?
Yes, I find this inconceivable for Africans as a whole, however I’m sure there are millions of individual exceptions. Don’t worry, from time to time I lament the moral situation of our society, and sometimes the news can make you wonder, but on the whole I believe the fact we’re first world and they’re (often) third world is due to the morality of the society in question. After all, it’s the morality that ends up embodied in things like indivdual rights in contrast to tribalism, rule of law, productive behaviour as a virute, reason as the primary means of making decisions, a generic dislike of violence, self respect, property rights etc etc etc. These things form the basis for individual empowerment and opportunity. It’s the moral choices being made that is the dominant reason most Africans don’t have individual empowerment and opportunity, not drought or the weather and not neglect of first world nations. Look at Zimbabwe, it’s got all the right elements in place to have it all, yet on the whole most Zimbabweans are still making bad moral choices from the top down.
Just FWI, here’s what some of the Congolese newspapers are reporting:
From L’Avenir on Saturday: “Il n’est pas décent de toujours déplorer pareils accidents, si l’on peut faire mieux. Le secret de la sécurisation des passagers dans ces trains de la Société nationale des chemins de fer du Congo (Sncc) réside dans la réorganisation de ce service. A l’instar d’un bon nombre d’entreprises publiques dans ce pays, la Sncc a besoin d’un renouvellement de son outil de travail. Mais aussi, le contrôle et le respect du nombre des passagers à bord des engins doivent être stricts et rigoureux. A en croire des témoignages recueillis sur le lieu de l’accident, plusieurs victimes seraient des clandestins qui étaient parvenus à s’infiltrer parmi les passagers réguliers.”
And from Observateur on Wednesday: “l a affirmé qu’une enquête vient d’être initiée par la direction Régionale de la SNCC pour déterminer les causes de l’accident, le deuxième du genre survenu au Kasaï Occidental, en l’espace de trois semaines. De leur côté, les responsables de la SNCC ont déploré les pertes en vies humaines survenues lors de cette catastrophe et ont confirmé que les victimes étaient des passagers clandestins qui ont l’habitude de prendre place à bord des wagons de marchandises, à l’insu des agents de la SNCC. Toujours selon la source, les accidents de train sont devenus très fréquents en République démocratique du Congo à cause de la vétusté du réseau ferroviaire mis en service à l’époque coloniale, et qui n’a plus été entretenu depuis l’accession du pays à l’indépendance.”
My French is not so spectacular that I’ll inflict my translation on you, Babelfish can give a rough but serviceable idea of the text.
My point? Not knowing anything about the independence of the Congolese media, it still seems clear that the Congolese people are analyzing their situation in pretty much the same terms the Minnesotans are — how did this happen, who is to blame, how will we mourn, what can we do. That the world isn’t paying attention to them in no way diminishes the commonality of the response.
Oh, and because I buried the point: The US Media are absolutely delighted to report something that looks like real news (instead of Paris Hilton or Nicole Ritchie) but that isn’t Iraq or the latest ethical mess in Congress. A scare-your-pants-off bridge collapse makes for a wonderful change.
Now, why the Australian media would want to pick up those stories on the wires and relay them to y’all, I’ll leave for you to decide. It’s a mystery to me.
Thanks Jody, fascinating point. The recent steam-vent explosion in Manhattan got reasonably extensive coverage here too in a way that I thought was interesting.
It’s perhaps a foolishly long bow to draw to link that incident with the Minneapolis bridge collapse but both events seem to have been received with almost a sigh of relief that is was ‘only’ neglected infrastructure that caused the disaster, not terrorism or some other malevolence. Interesting too to think about the reactions to these happenings compared with the reaction to Katrina.
“After all, it’s the morality that ends up embodied in things like indivdual rights in contrast to tribalism, rule of law, productive behaviour as a virute, reason as the primary means of making decisions, a generic dislike of violence, self respect, property rights etc etc etc.”
I don’t accept this idealist account, but then I don’t suppose you’re likely to take up a materialist position no matter what I say.
As far as Zimbabwe goes, well, a de facto dictatorship has been the icing on the cake after 100 years of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation and repression. I don’t think the moral choices that most Zimbabweans make have a lot to do with it at this point.
I don’t fully get your materialist position comment, but if you’re asking whether I can accept morality is perhaps not an issue: no I can’t. I definitely believe we can influence our situation by the choices that we make, that we are free to choose (within certain limits), and therefore it follows making the right or wrong choices is the study of morality and ethics.
I don’t fully get your materialist position comment, but if you’re asking whether I can accept morality is perhaps not an issue: no I can’t. I definitely believe we can influence our situation by the choices that we make, that we are free to choose (within certain limits), and therefore it follows making the right or wrong choices is the study of morality and ethics.
As for the ‘colonial and neo-colonial exploitation and repression’ are you sure it’s worse than the current regime? I honestly don’t know, but it would appear to me they went out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Michael, materialism is pretty much the inversion of what you’re suggesting: it is a way of understanding things that suggests that the material world is more important than the moral or intellectual in explaining how things come about. I wouldn’t be too strongly stressing a vulgar materialism, because I think things are more complex than that, but I do think that there has to be some analysis of material conditions in understanding how the world works.
I don’t know if it was ‘worse’ than the current regime, although I do know that the British cut a bloody swathe through the country and pursued a policy of deliberately unequal development, as did most colonial regimes, for decades. The apartheid-like white minority local rule – ending in the late 1970s – also goes a long way to explaining the conditions under which a leader like Mugabe can emerge and thrive. Mugabe has basically reversed but maintained the ethnic divisions and structural inequality of his predecessors, initially in the name of revolutionary justice.
Quotes from Karl Marx, the original materialist.
In response to comments on the difference between the media and other corporations above just a few thoughts.
Media, whether news or entertainment is not the same as other kinds of prouducts. Mark is slightly incorrect. The media do sell their products in the same way as a supermarket (more or less). But the nature of the product is different.
Most products are standardized. A can of beans is indistinguishable from another can of bean of the same quantity and brand. Week after week one can purchase a can of beans and will expect exactly the same thing. Although the media uses standard formats, genre to take advantage of mass-production techniques it cannot simply rebroadcast the same news every night. An episode of Seinfeld cannot use the same jokes and plotline as a former episode. Each episode must have different content albeit generically standardized.
This is in essence what is measurably different about cultural products from other kinds of products. This is because of the nature of what is being produced. Cultural products must always have something of artisinal originality about them to be saleable. Even the most formulaic of shows, say Big Brother, needs some kind of differentiation.
In regard to news media there is the further difference that what is ‘on sale’ is information. That information is used by the viewer to form opinions about the world and ultimately to make decisions including those decisions made at the ballot box. It is therefore central to the democratic process and implies duties and obligations on the part of the seller that go beyond those of other marketplaces.
In regards to the kith and kin line of argument. It is standard practise in news and current affairs to ‘orientate’ the imaginary viewer – actually a mass of individuals of diverse tastes and disposition of whom the producer knows not so much – using some basic guages often referred to as common denominators. The lower the common denominator the larger the potential audience.
This is something that a first year media student will learn as a matter of course.
If you check news on a regular basis you will find that stories are ranked not primarily in terms of their importance on a global scale but in proximity to ‘closeness’ to the viewer. Thus if some important breakthru in the Mid East peace process is accomplished it will probably still be shown sometime after the story about the tragic car crash that happened near where the viewers live. Similarly if there is some kind of atrocity in another country it will rank higher if Australians are involved.
As Australia and the United States are simpatico culturally in more ways than they are not it is entirely understandable that tragedies that occur there rank higher than tragedies that occur. It is simply a human fact. We care more about those closest to us (whether or not they in fact are) than those further away:
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As was observed in the 18th century:
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reason as the primary means of making decisions
Earlier on this thread it was being argued that decision-making in the media is driven solely by economic interest. By extension, that whichever editor decided to put the Minnesota bridge story both on the front page of the SMH and as the lead story in its World section did so because they have a paper to sell.
This was a criticism by Adam Smith of partial, unreliable compassion and the failure ofhuman imagination on which it is based.
Most widely accepted comprehensive ethical views, religious or secular, urge people to have wider spheres of concern than they are thought to have already: to cross boundaries of race, class, religion, nationality. Unfortunately, many also encourage people to narrow their concerns and despise and reject other groups.
Concern for others is not incompatible with giving one’s own family or group a special measure of concern.
re the media. Why is it so unreasonable to demand media that do not cultivate disgust with, dehumanisation of or indifference to very different others? Not only does the media have considerable power in shaping views and responses in the way it portrays events and which ones it chooses to tell, it also is a deliberative tool which can promote good deliberation about the preferred way of viewing things – or its converse.
As Australia and the United States are simpatico culturally in more ways than they are not it is entirely understandable that tragedies that occur there rank higher than tragedies that occur.
I think it’s very disputable that Australia and the US as societies are more alike than unalike, which I realise is slightly different from saying they are culturally sympatico. I think that whatever sympatico exists is historically recent and very much a product of the dominant US mass media, including music and film.
It is simply a human fact. We care more about those closest to us (whether or not they in fact are) than those further away
I think you are mixing up caring about with identifying with. I care as much or as little about disasters which happen to strangers in China as in the US. Obviously if a disaster happens close to home and could have involved me or might involve me in the future, I’m going to pay attention. (Critical attention.) But I’m very wary of being manipulated by the media into voyeuristic over-identification with dying people in one country but not another country – and that’s what I think was going on in the SMH coverage. By all means they could run a story about the causes of the bridge collapse. But the last words of the dying victims of that collapse were inappropriately made into the lead story – pure sensationalism.
the MSM also has a very important role in simultaneously terrorising and depoliticisng the populace. Which is where disaster reportage is such a neat fit.
Of course, major disasters in the US, rather than Rwanda or Laos, are going to play much more on the minds of pre-conditioned Australian citizens, so the media’s choice of coverage is clear. Pavlov’s dog effect.
No self-respecting cat would fall for such obvious ploys, naturellement.
Adam
Not quite. Materialism means that material conditions – mode of production and class relations – produce ideas, not the other way around. Of course, this leaves us with materialism having no more validity than the Judeo-Christian bourgeois milieu of Herr Marx circa the Germany of the early nineteenth century.
suz
Most of us have lived in, have friends/relatives who live in, and/or studied in the UK and US, whereas very few of us have even visited Africa.
The collapse of a major piece of infrastructure in a first world country perhaps because they didn’t invest in maintaining and renewing their infrastructure certainly has resonances here in Australia.
And as the MSM keep losing market share to the Web 2.0, they’re just gonna keep turning up the sensationalism dial.
“No, wait! Don’t leave me! Look, I’ve bought some crotchless panties!’
And I think Jody makes a good point too about the media’s relief at being able to report something that seems like real news and comes with good visuals too.
“And see, I can cook your favourites just like your mum used to. Big servings too, not like that You Tube slut.”
Suz – There are of course crucial differences between Oz and the US and as you say many are products of our consumption of US pop culture. I’d say there was some other fundamentals as well.
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Both nations are products of the British Empire; both in ways are ‘bastard children’ of that empire – America the rebellious, Australia the unwanted. Both are fundamentally hedonistic consumer cultures. There are of course differences – eg religion. But nevertheless we are culturally sympatico at the present time, a convergence that has been manifest since the second World War and is now more evident then ever. Particularly on the blogosphere.
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I’m not mixing ‘caring about’ and ‘identifying with’ although I’d say the two tend to go together. The fact that the media prioritizes deaths in the US and ignored deaths in Darfur is not an occasion for celebration. As Jinmaro says it is something to be criticized. However I don’t know whether the media set out to manipulate us so that we care about New Orleans but give not a tinkers about the latest Chinese mining disaster.
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The media do manipulate us, but in ways more subtle and more specific than that. The media also makes the sphere of sympathy significantly wider than it used to be. Take the Tsunami disaster. The coverage precipitated millions of dollars of private donations something that probably wouldn’t have occured in Adam Smith’s day at least partly because they would’ve read it in the paper maybe weeks after the event.
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Not as emotively powerful as live coverage.
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I agree that voyeuristic coverage of bridge collapse victims is sensational. I’d also like to see the media covering wider bridges of deep and avoidable tragedies (like Darfur) but I can’t entirely blame the media. They’re trying to sell newspapers and tv shows and where we go, they follow.
suz
For most of us this episode was of only passing interest days ago because it had fabulous footage of a the bridge collapsing. Why are YOU still so obssessed with it and not the Chinese floods/
All save libel are ‘weak’ regulations (advisory only, as the various Flint-Jones controversies revealed), and we are all vulnerable to suit for defamation (which takes in both libel and slander).
If I print off a serious of untruths about a neighbour and drop them into every mailbox in my street, that neighbour has a cause of action. The new uniform defamation laws have also removed the old ‘public interest’ requirement, leaving only ‘truth’, which weights the law considerably in favour of media bodies and serial mouth-off merchants. All that is by the by, however; defamation is a rich man’s tort, and does nothing to improve media accuracy or accountability. S52, by contrast, does a great deal to improve corporations’ accountability, and there is no reason why media corporations should be exempted from it.
On your other point, corporations in Australia are subjected to a plethora of industry-specific regulatory legislation, and it means nothing in terms of that industry’s ‘unique status’. If it did, I’d be rent-seeking for all it’s worth (as media organisations do, continually, on both a great and small scale) on behalf of the Qld resources sector, on account of my stock portfolio
Another non sequitur Mini-J. Oh, yer on a roll today. However you may want to visit Wikipedia again to brush up on Karl’s timelines. Remember though, look but don’t touch.
of course most sentient beings would see the perfect, blindingly obvious connection between deaths caused by a contemptuous indifference for the provision of the basic infrastructure necessary to guarantee the safety of even the most marginal people within the richest country on earth, and a single non-American citizen’s boasting of the value of her stock portfolio.
jinmaro [at 7:33 pm] said
Aaah. You noticed.
Jody:
Nice to get your American point of view …. unfiltered and unmodified by faceless sub-editors, news directors and other gatekeepers.
It’s worth remember that the framework for Australia’s defamation laws, while based on Brit statutes and common law, was constantly adapted in the 19th century by State Parliaments full of the squattocracy and the big end of town being driven to distraction by one of the most exuberent and prolific newsprint ecologies ever seen in the Western world. In the 1890s in Victoria alone, with a population of 1 million, there where 250 titles being published regularly, many by complete ratbags. T’was not unlike the blogosphere.
So our defamation laws were basically shaped by wealthy parliamentarians and their mates and sponsors wanting to shut up The Daily Gadfly, coming out of a shed in Collingwood or Balmain with scurrilous and/or accurate reports of pregnant mistresses and shonky land deals.
The typos in my last comment are a considered salute to those rough and ragged days of wild men with printing presses.
Indeed, Nabs. There’s a very good biography about one of the later manifestations of the Daily Gadfly, called IIRC, ‘The Scandalous Penton’. Alas I’ve forgotten the author, but a very entertaining read, especially the bits on the daily ‘Dance with D-Notices’ routine.
Well said jinmaro.
Patrick Buckridge, from Griffith. Won the NSW Premier’s Prize for nonfiction in its year.
Thanks, PC. All my books have of necessity been abandoned in Oz, so I’m reading my way through Deus Ex Macintosh’s library – mathematics and tech journalism, by and large, so a bit of a change for me.
Buckridge’s biography really is a very good read, and gives some context to exactly this sort of debate.
Yes, I recall “The Scandalous Penton” too. I’ve always felt there was a great movie/mini-series that could be set in the balls to the wall anarchic world of Australian print journalism – set any time from the 1890s to the early 1970s. Kinda like Newsfront meets Mad Men.
A few true anecdotes could illustrate how it could play out:
-the young Rupert Murdoch and his heavies physically throwing a young Kerry and Clyde Packer out of a disputed printing plant;
- Steve “Hard Copy” Steve Dunleavy explaining in some interview how he hates John Pilger’s politics but how they always have great pissups togethers as fellow veterans who worked side by side in the early days;
- the Australian journalist, who while covering the Six Day War, managed to bring a IDF jeep back on his expense account; and
- of course Richard Henderson, the only journalist immortalised as a major fictional character by both Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.
Nowadays, they just sit in front of their terminals rewriting web feeds and taking short sober lunches.
Hey LP moderator on duty. I think have a comment on this thread stuck in the spam dam. Wanna fish it out? It has at least one good link and floats the possibilty of something I could cheerfully collaborate on with Tim Blair.
Props to you for ideological consistency, SL, but as someone who’s both been a contributor and the subject of commentary in various news outlets, you must have noticed differences not unrelated to their editorial line and indeed the views and influence of their proprietor. I’m just not buying the “media is the same as breakfast cereal” line and that’s even before we get to issues such as the barriers to market entry (at least in old media).
Graham, A better place to get unfiltered views of average US residents might be the comments sections of articles posted in the on-line version of USA Today.
As a newspaper, it’s been poked fun at since its creation in the mid-80s: it was part of that generation of “dumbing down the news.” It was the first newspaper to publish in full color, and it’s known for its graphs and large fonts and very, very basic coverage. But it’s also the newspaper handed out for free at business hotels along the Interstates, and is probably the national newspaper that most people read (as opposed to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times to a lesser extent — those being the MSM that most “well informed” readers will turn to, when they read newspapers at all).
Here’s a small sample of comments on the latest USA Today article about the Minneapolis bridge collapse:
“Okay, the bridge collapsed…Minnesota lost 5 people’s lives. I’m sorry for them and their families, but is it really necessary to continue the story day in and day out. We’ve become a national of voyeurs and crybabies. If people spent half as much time with their family as they do worrying about someone else’s family, the world would be a whole lot better place. Please our world and country is falling apart around us and this is the best they can cover 24/7…where’s OJ and his knife when you need him?”
“Would those monies that you are complaining about have gone to fix THIS SPECIFIC bridge? I would like to see where you have the information if you say yes because as far as the agencies in charge of inspecting bridge they said it was safe with minor repairs needed.. And wait, didn’t the bridge collapse while these repairs were being done?? … If you want to blame someone, blame the agencies in charge of inspecting the bridges because either there was something they missed, or blame the construction company because they did something to cause this. ”
[This comment shows that the reader isn't even reading the newspaper's coverage, because the construction being done was only resurfacing, and the repairs needed had to do with structural faults in the pilings. The inspectors didn't miss anything, based on current estimates, and the construction company wasn't there to fix the problems identified.]
“I wonder if you people realize that the savings you suggest by ending America’s involvement in Iraq are not real. The U.S. military still has to feed, clothe and shelter these people regardless of their position in the world. Add to it military exercises, target practice, weapons development, maintenance, and repair and you wind up saving very little. Try hard to think a little before repeating that liberal nonsense that you see plastered all over the Internet.”
[The lack of awareness of pre- and post-Iraq military expenditure levels there hurts my head.]
“This administration, and all of Congress, all of them, anything for the BUCK. Screw the people. WorldNetDaily: NAFTA Superhighway traffic tied to bridge collapse http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57017 ”
[Because it's all about the global conspiracy to Destroy America. Another recent headline on that site? "Get the inside story on the war against Christianity" They're also holding a reader poll on whether you'll watch "24" less now that the producers are offsetting their carbon production -- because caring about global climate change is a sign of unacceptable "PC" attitudes.]
It’s this very thing that makes media bodies more like pet food or breakfast cereal than not, Mark. Once we realise that – like breakfast cereal – there’s probably more crunchy goodness in the packet than in the product, we’ll be getting somewhere. In other words, treat media corporations with the contempt they deserve, and expose them to the same legal consequences for chicanery as we do any other corporation.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Of course John, if it’s a straightforward marxist materialism, then your definition is better. Thanks to Chav for the quotations. There are other non-marxist or post-marxist materialisms around as well. Feeling too ill to go into details, I’m sure if anybody’s interested, there are plenty of learned people on this blog.
Spinozist materialism of course. Predated Marxism.
So many materialisms, so little time.