In 1981 and 1982 the major organs of the American press were gripped by the plight of Cuban and Haitian refugees making the perilous voyage to Florida's shores in flimsy, overcrowded vessels. The story had a number of attractions: adventure on the high seas, the theme of the American dream, a subject for humanitarian concern, an occasion for xenophobic alarm Prominent among these was the clearly dramatic interest in the desperation of the refugees. The Washington Post recounts the harrowing tale of a Haitian named Joseph (no surname given), a man with "no money, no crops, no future," whose only hope is to "educate his young son".....The struggle for simple human survival, the terrified refugees, the atavistic prayers are all standard third-world material. The emphasis is on the picturesque such that, as Agee would say, the viewed at a distance. (Spurr 1993: 47)
The early eighties news renditions of "a famine of biblical proportions" in Ethiopia, the photographs of starving coal miners in Appalachia, all of these things are displayed in the crucifictic aesthetic of noble suffering embodied by Life Magazine photography. Photo/logo-mediated disaster is nice to look at, and its juxtaposition with unimportant events and advertisements lends to its theatrical quality. Marcel Proust (in Spurr 1993: 45) describes how a French newspaper is completely lacking in hierarchies of importance, and how this lack affects the reader.
I wanted to glance at Le Figaro, to enter into that abominable and voluptuous experience called reading the newspaper, by virtue of which all sorrows and upheavals of the universe during the last twenty-four hours, the battles that have cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the crimes, strikes, bankruptcies, fires, poisonings, suicides, divorces, the wrath of statesmen and performers-- conveyed for our personal use, to those of us who are not affected--in a morning feast--all this goes excellently, in a particularly stimulating and tonic manner, with the recommended ingestion of several mouthfuls of cafe; au lait. (Spurr 1993: 45) Television shows like "Hard Copy" and "A Current Affair" offer a similar but more obvious experience, sandwiching the grisly death of a high school cheerleader between an exorcism and an interview with a lost cat who returned home after twenty-one days at sea. In Portland, local news follows the same sort of program, giving equal coverage to a high school soccer tournament and a hurricane.
Straddling the line between theater and reality, grisly and/or pathetic news has a pornographic value; we watch it thinking "isn't that terrible", but there is a titillating quality to terror one step removed. There is a catch: the voyeurism of suffering loses its affect as fast as any drug, so that in order to jerk tears **picture disaster 2**(an important component of newsworthiness), someone else's disaster must be the most devastating ever, the worst that one expert or another has ever seen. If the potential for pathos is insufficient, the news vans move on; lucky for them there's always a disaster going on somewhere, and globalization enables anyone with cable television to see any war, famine, or outbreak of mad cow disease from right up close.
I am not suggesting that it is inherently bad to be interested in the bloody and extreme; I think this is a natural part of being human, but I also think it could be harnessed for higher purposes. Take, for instance, something that happened in Portland a few weeks ago. A family's moving van was stolen with all of their possessions inside. The story was aired on the evening news, and within days, the family had everything they needed. What if the same spirit of community could be awakened for ongoing disasters? News coordinators are quick to say that if viewers see too many signs of suffering they will lose their empathy, but I believe it might be possible to create a habit of action that feeds off, but takes precedence over the aesthetic of disaster. The media could help by filling dead space with ongoing issues, taking sort of an "Unsolved Mysteries" approach to continuing disasters.
Normally, disasters disappear from the headlines long before any sort of recovery has been made, leaving a lot of readers/viewers with an album of commemorative photographs and the idea that the problem has been solved. But what if someone came on the news every day and said, "Hey, did you know women still don't make as much money as men for the same jobs? Are you aware that the Chinese government is still violating international civil rights laws? Although they've been shuffled to another part of town, the many people in Portland are still homeless. What are you going to do about it?" Of course we can't solve all the problems in the world, but we might have a better chance at solving some of them if we put away our scrapbooks long enough to admit that problems still exist.