The world's most powerful earthquake in more than 40 years struck deep under the Indian Ocean off the west coast of Sumatra, triggering massive tsunamis that obliterated villages and seaside resorts in several countries across southern and Southeast Asia.
says CNN.
It is a disaster, truly, a catastrophe of unheard of dimensions. The numbers of its victims keep rising all the time.
BUT DOES THIS JUTIFY THE MEDIA FLOOD that follows that tidal wave? I don't think so. Honestly speaking - I am disgusted. There are reporters everywhere. They are on the scene reading us the latest statistics, reciting the cold numbers of the dead, the injured and the missing again and again. Others are waiting at airports to ask returning survivors for their accounts, with cameras eying for the tears of relief or anguish and microphones trying to catch the sobbing, the crying. Experts are called into the studios to explain the unexplainable over and over again. Consternation on every face, but is it real? Disasters are bread for the media. People are glued to their TV sets waiting to be fed the freshest crumbs of news.
I hate the dramatizing of what happened. People survived. They were lucky. A reporter points out that they lost all their personal belongings. That's so horrible, no suitcases, no passports, ... That was when the first reports came in, when no one over here or there had any idea of the magnitude of the disaster. Later the TV crews sent to cover the "event" life fed a steady stream of pictures that were by itself horrible enough. Next came the life videos made by amateurs. They showed the waves. These short sequences often shot with shaky hands and commented with shouts of disbelieve gave viewers a glimpse at what "REALLY" happened. Now into the third day after the tsunami there are still some more of these amateur eye witness videos. And more are to come to be broadcast in endless repetition by every station. More survivors arrive to give testimony of the horrors they had to live through. But this is not enough. We need to ask relatives, people who fear for their children, brothers, sisters, parents, uncles, aunts a.s.o., people still uncertain about whether their relatives are save or not. With deeply worried faces they let us take part in their quest for information. Then there are those that know that they lost someone or that theirs are save. We watch their tears of despair or joy. And if we could suck the memories of the last moments of those that perished in anguish we would be fed these as well and people would savour these as well.
It is a ghoulish fascination with death and catastrophe that drives people to watch these pictures for hours although they are broadcast in repetition on and on and on, hour after hour, day after day.
But does it have to be like this? Do we need to be like vultures feeding on the despair of others?
Of course there is an interest in this catastrophe because the disaster area is where Americans, Australian and Europeans like to spend their holidays. Some people even do really have a personal interest because they have loved ones there. They want to know, they need to know about the fate of their relatives or friends.
In my humble opinion this does not excuse in any way the media's dance around the despair and grief of victims, family and friends, dead or alive, and the resulting flood of just sad pictures or of these many ghastly pictures of bloated bodies drifting in the seas, of arms or legs sticking out of rubble of collapsed buildings or of bodies carried to mass-graves.
