Today's daydreaming portion of the ride home was altered about a minute and a half prior to arriving at my final destination. A real, honest-to-goodness thought interrupted my regular programming. I quickly looked outside to see if pigs had grown wings and taken flight. I couldn't find any. So I cracked my window open to see if the weather had turned icy. Nope, still hot and sticky. Something must be in the water then.
My thought was (drumroll, please): "I wonder why I haven't felt as compassionately towards the poor folks who were crushed by the rockslide in Moqattam last week as I do for people dealing with natural disasters abroad... "
I immediately answered my own question:
It's because of the catastrophic lack of media attention the issue has received. Aside from a terse, two paragraph news bulletin I read off the BBC website the morning of, I've seen and heard very little else about the events. What differentiates this from other events is the effect media has on delivering the message. The more sensationalist the media's tranference of the message, the more empathetic you are to the event.
When US media talks about a cat being saved from a tree by a firefighter, they turn it into a mini hero movie. When Egyptian media talks about 1,000 people dying in a ferry accident, it's just another news item read off the teleprompter in the same monotonous robotic manner.
To the average Egyptian, we hear about death and disaster on a daily basis, being stuck in the centre of the global hotspot - the Middle East. Carbombs, suicide bombs, war, famine, disease, and natural disasters are all part of the region's daily routine. We've become desensitized to it. So has our media, which is quite lacking in pathos to begin with. So when 46 or so poverty-stricken people living in a shanty town are crushed by a rockslide, it's all in a day's work for both the citizens and the media. How could we feel terrible over something that has become the norm?
So what we need is a more sensationalist media, like in the US. We need a media that will force you to take note, and is as ubiquitous as it is in the US. Then, we'd be roused into action and maybe a future crisis like the Moqattam disaster could be avoided. Until then, the majority of us will continue to sit on our fat bottoms in our air-conditioned chauffeured vehicles daydreaming about nothing in particular - or at the very least, lunch.
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1 comment:
It's deeper than a press coverage issue. It's a question of self-worth.
I did a little press analysis (which, forgive the self-advertisement, is here) on how the media handled the hostage crisis in the Gilf-al-Kabeer, and particularly how the Egyptian guides were represented and, bottom line, they were represented the worst in British and Egyptian press...
We have been conditioned to think that 'we', collectively and individually, is worthless.
So 10 people die, big deal. So a mine collapses on 30 people, we shrug. So a car runs an innocent child over - big deal, happens a 100 times every day.
It's not a more warrior media we need: it's more collective self-esteem.
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