Fill that news cycle with paranoia | Voltage Gate

Wring your hands, America.

At first, the disaster coverage was somber, straightforward. The major news outlets broadcast raw video, fly-over footage of the humbling scale of the swell of seawater over communities and farmland, over cars, houses and fleeing citizens. Narrators were truly affected. You could hear it in their voice. There was this terrified awe in the scant words that could be found to describe one of the few events that can reduce all our industrial might to insignificance in a matter of hours.

Then, a few days later, the scurrying begins.

Inevitably. the media is trying to diversify the coverage of the disaster in Japan to fill the 24 hour news cycle. This is where it starts to get really bad.

Journalists begin the search for new ways to describe the situation. They start applying inane metaphors. The very real, very frightening struggle is put into fantastic terms. Japanese engineers are battling fire-breathing dragons and vicious sea monsters, the implication being that these figments are somehow aptly descriptive of a deadly encounter beyond the norm. More descriptive, perhaps, than the horror of the situation itself: the decimation of large coastal communities by earthquake and tsunami and now the potential of a meltdown caused by the latter, the fallout from which could be spread across thousands of kilometers. These workers have signed their lives away to attempt to avert this tertiary catastrophe and sacrifice their own health to preserve that of others, and somehow, this real act of heroic dedication becomes an appurtenance to a trite metaphor.

Largely, the focus has shifted from the aftermath in Japan to how it affects us, in this country. We’re in a panic about the radiation invading the US with any potency. Anti-nuclear politicians take the cue to dust off the old soapbox and pump their fists in anger. The sanctioned paranoia drives us to care, to question our own safety. While watching Henry Waxman blather on insincerely about nuclear safety I imagined every nuclear engineer in the country scrambling to book a two week vacation while the politicians pitch a new tent in the ongoing self-serving moralistic circus of opportunity.

Tags: Media, Politics

via scientopia.org

The best assessment of the Japanese Apocalypse I have read to date. American perspective, but globally relevant. How about just withdrawing the journalists and donating money?

Posted via email from poobumwee's posterous