Disaster Porn
Click here to view this media This topic came up for some brief discussion on Real Time With Bill Maher that ought to be part of a larger one, and that is just how sorry the state of our corporate media is with misinforming the public. Everything that is supposed to be “news” is either, as they described it here, “disaster porn” where you’re making a buck chasing one ambulance after the other in order to increase your ratings, meanwhile, informing the public about nothing, or if you’re not doing that you’re putting up two people supposedly on different sides of an issue and at least one or both of them are lying to the viewers in the name of being “fair and balanced.” What’s really pitiful about this ambulance chasing is the fact that they do it, and get the public worked up over an issue, and then ignore it. How many reports have we seen about what’s going on in Egypt now that things are constantly turning there? What happened to the reporting on Haiti that they were so breathlessly reporting right after the disaster there? And we all watched them cover the gusher of oil BP had pouring into the Gulf until they got tired of that story as well. I could go on and on but won’t since it’s not necessary to make the point I wanted to here. If our media wants to chase ambulances and pretend like they’re not just doing “disaster porn”, is it too much to expect them to do some follow up on the people and those countries that they feigned so much concern for in their previous breathless coverage we watched just a few months before? Apparently it is too much to ask for them to chase more than one ambulance at a time. And that’s exactly what Maher described here. It’s disaster porn feeding off of the latest ambulance of the day to chase while ignoring most of what’s going on around the world and calling yourself “news.” And it’s a damned shame that media consolidation in America has assured us we won’t get much better until these companies are broken up .
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on March 19, 2011. Filed under