Tragedy Porn, Did It Do It For You?

By Darryl Mason

The Professional Idiot thinks he has found a potential comment volcano in the ugly truths that Ross Gittins writes about here. The Professional Idiot takes a couple of reasonable arguments that Gittens raises - for example, that the media coverage of the Victorian bushfires has been hyperbolic and Spielbergian in its gratuitously obvious manipulation of our emotions - and claims that those wanting to help out the victims must be "sick". Gittins says no such thing. It's a concoction of The Professional Idiot's poisoned mind.

The Professional Idiot wants his readers to go all out in hammering Gittens - "Please don’t restrain your criticism of Gittins," he goads, "Any pity you may feel for him is just a sign of your depravity" - but it completely backfires, with about 80% of commenters agreeing that Gittins is pretty much exactly right when he says that the media focus on the Victorian bushfires (to the exclusion of other tragedies and daily tales of loss and hardship) bordered on pornographic, and that while Australians are lining up to help out the survivors this time, they are mostly missing in action when, say, The Red Cross, appeals for blood donors at any other time during the average year.

Here's the two snippets The Professional Idiot provides to provoke his readers :

The outpouring of public concern over the terrible Victorian bushfires, the rush to give blood, the huge amount of donations, the efforts of governments to do all they can to help, the way business has swung behind the appeal for assistance - it makes you proud to be an Aussie.

Is that how you feel? I don’t. I find it all strangely disturbing and distasteful.

And it's served to strengthen my suspicion that the community's reaction to natural disasters is exploitative, voyeuristic, unfair, self-gratifying and even pathological.

Selective quoting at its best. And strange, too, seeing as The Professional Idiot usually fills his blog with hundreds and hundreds of words written by others. Not this time. Gittins nails so many extremely valid points about the media and public reaction to the undeniably horrific human tragedy of the Victorian Fires 2009 (Part One) that The Professional Idiot must be seething with jealousy. Gittins already controversial piece makes most of TPI's recent efforts at trying to Capture The Emotion of the tragedy seem so much trivial fluff. It must be doubly grating for The Professional Idiot that so many of his readers so overwhelmingly agree with Gittins.

Here's some of the hassh reality from Gittins that The Professional Idiot chose to ignore because he is exactly the kind of Tabloid Media that Ross Gittins so relentlessly hammers and holds in contempt (excerpts) :

...media coverage of this (disaster has) gone way over the top. And it's served to strengthen my suspicion that the community's reaction to natural disasters is exploitative, voyeuristic, unfair, self-gratifying and even pathological.

Natural disasters are a time when emotions and appearances reign supreme and rational thought goes overboard. Let a victim corner a politician on talkback radio and he'll agree to almost anything. The media devote such huge resources of space and airtime to covering natural disasters for an obvious reason: they believe it will increase their circulations and ratings.

But don't blame it all on the media. They do what they do because they know it's what their audience wants.

I've never liked having my emotions revved up by the media, but it's clear most people do. They want the media to give their feelings of sympathy, sorrow and grief a good workout.

The unspeakable truth is that most people enjoy a good natural disaster. We're fascinated by the misfortune of others. It's a form of entertainment, just as people find weepies and horror movies entertaining. As part of this, audiences want as much personal, intimate detail about the victims' trauma as possible, and the media deliver.

I suspect we use natural disasters to add interest and excitement to our humdrum lives. Modern city life leaves us with weaker connections to our extended families and neighbours, so whereas once we could let our emotions loose on the misadventures of people we knew, now we need the mass media to provide our emotional exercise.

Our preoccupation lasts a week or two before the media senses our waning interest and turns away, waiting for the next natural disaster to get excited about.

Our emotion-driven caring is highly selective. People with problems get wonderful treatment provided their problems make good TV footage and for the 15 minutes they're in the media spotlight. People with chronic (old-hat), unphotogenic problems get ignored.

Media Watch examined the Tragedy Porn of the Australian media last night, and how some journalists stomped their way through crime scenes, homes to which owners had been denied access. The transcript is here.

You only have to look at the Top Stories listings at our online mainstream media to see that our interest in the victims of the Victorian Fires is already waning.

Then again, how much emotion can anybody be expected to commit to such a tragedy? Life goes on, everybody's got their own problems to deal with, and the media goes back to hunting, and waiting, for the next moment of National Caring that reminds us, indeed, how much we really do care. Or want to care.

Or want to feel like we are caring.

It's hard to imagine that anything could happen that will let loose again such an outpouring of National Caring, but it will.

What's next? A massive train wreck? An earthquake sinking half of Sydney's CBD? A tsunami wiping out dozens of villages along our endless coastline? A cyclone carrying away most of Cairns?

And what will the reaction be the next time a firestorm wipes out an Australian town or three? Will we be more sympathetic, or less? Will there be a guilty reaction from feeling, 'Been there, done that'?

Will another holocaust seem more horrific or less, if the bodycount is only 50 instead of more than 200?