Apathy

Last night's episode of The Daily Show featured Lara Logan, chief foreign correspondent for CBS News. I couldn't place the accent, but don't be fooled by her babeness, people: she means business.

Among the many things that she said in her gutsy and forthright manner, I especially liked that she questioned how the U.S. news media never shows dead American soldiers on television (see video below for that portion of the interview).

This is an idea that I've struggled with in the past. In fact, I've heard that there's actually an unwritten rule about this in the world of broadcast journalism: you can show dying/dead black people, brown people, yellow people, old people, women, and even children - but not white people.

Think about it: if Katrina had hit the Upper East Side, do you think you would have seen a single image from the death and destruction that followed? Would you even know how to begin imagining such a picture? Lots of homeless white people, sitting on crates in hunger, with flies on their faces. Hmm, have we ever even seen a picture like that?

Would people, the government, the world have responded faster than they did if they'd seen white people suffering instead of the typical image of a poor black person struck by calamity?

The U.S. news media actively protects the ordinary public from such images, and in doing so reinforces all of our worst and deepest cultural/racial/social stereotypes. In the case of not showing dead American soldiers on television, they perform an additional (and even greater) disservice to not just the public, but the soldiers themselves.

By not honoring and reminding the public about the sacrifices made by the very people who are protecting them; by not bringing the war into the living rooms of ordinary Americans; by not making a visually compelling case that the war must come to an end, the media is acting irresponsibly and playing a big part in shaping our apathetic attitudes towards this war.

We continue to feel that the war is 'someone else's problem'; we become numb to the situation, and learn to ignore the rising number of casualties and fatalities each day; we drive ourselves to focus even more inwardly into our own lives, and not give a crap about the world around us. Instead of worrying about the common good, we think, "as long as it doesn't affect me, I don't care."

I don't know about you, but I don't like being insensitive and blindfolded. All of this sounds suspiciously like the age-old 'divide and conquer' strategy to me, and we all know how great that worked out in the 20th century.

Don't we owe it to ourselves to remain vigilant? To keep asking questions? To keep caring?