If you're reading this, you've no doubt heard about the freaking enormous earthquake and tsunami that devastated the east coast of Japan recently. If you're not reading this... well technically that's impossible since you're reading this text right now. Anyway, I noticed something interesting in the media coverage of the Sendai, Japan earthquake to the one last year in Port Au Prince, Haiti. That something is the content of the pictures taken of the damage.
In the pictures returned via a Google image search for "Japan earthquake 2011," the vast majority of them show damaged structures and seismic data. The few that do show people do not show them wailing in the streets. Most of them show people assisting in reconstruction, or surveying the destruction of their towns.
Here's a snapshot of what I got during the most recent search I did:
Compare that to this snapshot, taken when I did a search result for "Haiti earthquake 2010":
The differences are interesting to note. In the Haiti photos, we see many pictures of people crushed under rubble, or being assisted by foreigners, or waiting around in shock. It is interesting to note that Haiti's population and Japan's population are similar in that they are very homogenous. Yet we do not see the same kind of treatment applied to these populations when it comes to disasters. Both disasters were huge in scale. However, it seems that the media coverage of disasters in 3rd world countries almost always swings toward pictures of women and children weeping in the streets, or people horribly injured in the disasters.
I don't know quite what to make of the disparity. Maybe it speaks to the rabid desire in major news media outlets to get ratings by exploiting heartstring-tugging pictures of rubble-covered orphans. Maybe it says something about the way we look down on infrastructure in developing nations, that when it is destroyed, we only focus on a few landmarks and don't give much of it a second thought. I don't even know if it's really right or wrong. Part of me doesn't even care. Maybe that says more about me than anything else. Maybe it says nothing.
I think Sean Penn is kind of a douche, but in a way he is right when he says that we need to focus on helping people long after the media decides it's no longer fashionable. If our media were operating back after World War II the way it operates now, we'd have headlines a few months after V-J day reading something like "Marilyn Monroe Wins Oscar!" (buried on page 17 next to ads for Bryll-cream: Marshall Plan helping to restructure Europe after near-total obliteration).
If you are inclined to help, you can donate directly to the
Japanese Red Cross via Google:
http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html
This is one of my more rambling posts, so I apologize to the readers I've somehow not managed to alienate yet. But sometimes the Earth burps or wiggles a bit and humanity is caught in the middle, and my tolerance for writing my typical bullshit wears thin.
In the pictures returned via a Google image search for "Japan earthquake 2011," the vast majority of them show damaged structures and seismic data. The few that do show people do not show them wailing in the streets. Most of them show people assisting in reconstruction, or surveying the destruction of their towns.
Here's a snapshot of what I got during the most recent search I did:
Compare that to this snapshot, taken when I did a search result for "Haiti earthquake 2010":
The differences are interesting to note. In the Haiti photos, we see many pictures of people crushed under rubble, or being assisted by foreigners, or waiting around in shock. It is interesting to note that Haiti's population and Japan's population are similar in that they are very homogenous. Yet we do not see the same kind of treatment applied to these populations when it comes to disasters. Both disasters were huge in scale. However, it seems that the media coverage of disasters in 3rd world countries almost always swings toward pictures of women and children weeping in the streets, or people horribly injured in the disasters.
I don't know quite what to make of the disparity. Maybe it speaks to the rabid desire in major news media outlets to get ratings by exploiting heartstring-tugging pictures of rubble-covered orphans. Maybe it says something about the way we look down on infrastructure in developing nations, that when it is destroyed, we only focus on a few landmarks and don't give much of it a second thought. I don't even know if it's really right or wrong. Part of me doesn't even care. Maybe that says more about me than anything else. Maybe it says nothing.
I think Sean Penn is kind of a douche, but in a way he is right when he says that we need to focus on helping people long after the media decides it's no longer fashionable. If our media were operating back after World War II the way it operates now, we'd have headlines a few months after V-J day reading something like "Marilyn Monroe Wins Oscar!" (buried on page 17 next to ads for Bryll-cream: Marshall Plan helping to restructure Europe after near-total obliteration).
If you are inclined to help, you can donate directly to the
Japanese Red Cross via Google:
http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html
This is one of my more rambling posts, so I apologize to the readers I've somehow not managed to alienate yet. But sometimes the Earth burps or wiggles a bit and humanity is caught in the middle, and my tolerance for writing my typical bullshit wears thin.
Emphatic MJ wins.
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