Ahh, our post-racial world.
You’ll notice that photos as shocking as have been published on the Boston Globe and the New York Times concerning Haiti would not nor could have been published about Sept 11th, 2001. Showing open piles of corpses and people shot in the head by police on the major media as if it’s an anthropological study or a documentary – including watching a girl die on live TV – is sickening, and evidence that in a fundamental way the people of Haiti are viewed with a sense of disdain by the American press. Like they’re less than people.
It’s not unlike how Black victims were depicted during Hurricane Katrina. And it didn’t even take a day for the loonies to come out and be given plenty of air time to blame the victims – as they have for Katrina and 9/11 (sinful, lascivious Blacks and sinful, lascivious gays, respectively). Idiot opinions and gory videos have always been around – from Vietnam to Beirut to Tehran – but this isn’t a war and the visuals then were either first-hand or objective and respectful (with notable exceptions) as journalists could not pick sides.
There’s a difference between showing butchery in a conflict as to document the insanity of war or the moral bankruptcy of the aggressor and showing a morbid desire to see suffering without just cause. As if the blood itself is what makes it good journalism, reducing message to mere spectacle.
I wonder, at this point, how all the mainstream media gets their personnel down there to decide the narrative when we can’t even seem to ship more than eight thousand meals a day for two million victims.
This goes hand in hand « Big Smoke
on Jan 22nd, 2010
@ 4:55 pm:
[...] hold-up is supposedly because of security: They’re worried, like in New Orleans, at what Black people would do when desperate; hence the hang-up with “looting.” Or, to [...]
Oh really? « Big Smoke
on Jan 24th, 2010
@ 12:58 pm:
[...] The Public Editor of the New York Times defended, today, the paper’s publishing of gory pictures from Haiti. [...]
zynga
on Mar 20th, 2010
@ 6:38 pm:
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