Violence, disaster and death have become selling points for the media. Samir Nazareth explores the media’s love for stories that reek of gore and the viewers’ apathy. Grief, destruction, riots, death have become banal. Our threshold to accepting such tragedies has increased because it is brought to us daily from distant lands. Even though faraway tragedies are brought to our sitting rooms and are made personal, it has come to a point were we do not react to it and don’t even feel the need to do nothing.

War as daily diet for the masses

Violence, disaster and death have become selling points for the media. Samir Nazareth explores the media’s love for stories that reek of gore and the viewers’ apathy.


Some years ago, the then US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, had said that those Iraqi children who lost their lives due to the UN sanctions were an acceptable loss. Now, after years off sanctions and a war, Iraq is finally ‘free’. However, enroute to this freedom, we as humans have been the losers, having lost out to the market demands of war, unreasonable arguments and to the media frenzy that feeds off human frailty and disasters.

Sanctions take a toll

A recent study by Dr Richard Garfield of the Columbia University suggests that the US led UN sanctions accounted for morbidity and mortality rates of 500,000 to 560,000 young children under the age of five.

Garfield also states that nearly 1.2 million people of all ages were killed due to the sanctions by 1995, 1.4 million by 1997, and roughly 1.5 million by mid 1998, of which a whopping 750,000 were children under the age of five. And last but not the least, the recent gulf war accounted for nearly 10,000 Iraqi civilian casualities. These figures are not shocking when compared to the carnage of Rwanda or the genocide in Cambodia. But what was shocking in Iraq was that there was an international complicity in bringing Iraq to this position.

Several ally countries argued that this was a necessary sacrifice to bring the Iraqi tyrant down to his knees. Further there seemed to be an international conspiracy of silence during this tragedy. News corporations were either stymied by international red tape or were part of cabals that had interests in what was going on in Iraq.

Over time, images and news of war have become no longer horrifying, as reality shows and onsite coverage nibble away at our ability to express any emotion, be it disgust, revulsion or shock. The media has in fact been succesfully desensitising us to human tragedy. With a constant dose of violence be it in news and entertainment, there is no relief from reality. Violence and disaster have become the selling points.

One of the most graphic scenes of the recent Iraq war was when the invading forces entered Baghdad. While reporters waxed eloquent about the sudden attack and the disarray in the Iraqi army, there was an accompanying live feed of Iraqi soldiers in their underpants, running away as bullets nipped at their feet. It seemed like a scene straight out of a war movie where the director was commended for the real yet dirty depiction of war. The only thing missing was the popcorn.

The possibility of a person being killed on TV in cold blood was lost - by the reporter and by those viewing. Life, something that is intrinsic to who we are, was lost in that moment of reportage and in the ability of ‘being there’.
War, which is one of the constructs of economics, politics and technology, has given birth to a list of terms that make insignificant the effects of war, the destructive capacity of ammunitions and the tragedy of death in war.

Fat Man, Little Boy

It all began in 1947 when the two atomic weapons were called Fat Man and Little Boy, though the story goes that they were named after Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. However, the names did nothing to suggest the immense destructive power they carried in them.

Tests for nuclear weapons have wide ranging names all suggesting national pride and a coming of age. Operation Bravo and Operation Shakti come to mind immediately.

The American dream of creating a nuclear missile shield goes under the name ‘star wars’, not because Americans dream of destroying ‘enemy missiles’ in space but because the proponents of this system believe in the inherent goodness of their nation. The movie Star Wars and its story of the battle against good and evil and the final triumph of good makes a great metaphor for such a weapon system.

While proponents of this system see this as an attempt to keep America out of harms way, not many know that the first stages of the weapon system will cost more than $600 billion, that the US backtracked on the NPT and other missile treaties and that with this weapon a whole new arms race will be put in place. It also hides the fact that such a missile system will be practically impossible to operate.

War and weapons have created a whole new term/acronym generating industry. Killing machines hide behind terms such as MOAB (massive ordinance air blast bomb also known as mother of all bombs), bunker busters and daisy bombs. Weapons are also named after famous dead people or feelings.

Naval ships are named after famous people, missile systems, Patriot anti missile system, use national pride, while other weapons are named after Gods and deities.
Such names propose the idea of ‘a weapons of the good’ and hence inherently justify their use. Names of Indian and Pakistani missile systems — Trishul, Agni and Ghauri are a case in point

The media has also got into this game and has begun using terms such as ‘friendly fire’, ‘noncombatant causalities’, ‘collateral damage’ to distract the reader or viewer from the real damage a weapon causes. Such terms hide the fact that soldiers are meant to kill and that weapons are infact ‘broad spectrum killers’ and there is no such thing as an intelligent weapon.

Desensitised

Grief, destruction, riots, death have become banal. Our threshold to accepting such tragedies has increased because it is brought to us daily from distant lands. Even though faraway tragedies are brought to our sitting rooms and are made personal, it has come to a point were we do not react to it and don’t even feel the need to do nothing. The argument that we would react if it were close to us no longer stands true, because what we see is on real time, with analysis to boot. In effect we have become an uninterested audience to all the destruction across the world.

As humans, we are force-fed graphic images with voice-overs that use terms to negate the immensity of a tragedy. A lullaby of names and terms has put our conscience and outrage to sleep. We are in fact the newest ‘noncombatant causalities’ of the war machine.

It all adds up to a big zero.

Many have said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. Going further, this line is blurred between human ingenuity and cruelty. This gray area is being used to the hilt in today’s world.Media is no longer about reportage but about how reality is brought to one’s dinner table.

 http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/july112004/artic1.asp

[article.email.prefix]: Phan Dong Xanh phan_dong_xanh@yahoo.com

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