After the Dec.14 shooting in Newtown, Conn., the American Psychological Association published an article to aid parents navigating their children through the aftermath of national tragedies. The APA advised parents to talk with, reaffirm the safety of and not lie to their children. Notable was an admonition against children’s overconsumption of media to prevent the misinterpretation of multiple networks covering one attack as numerous bombings or shootings across the country.
As we move further and further from the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, it’s clear that news rationing should extend to adults as well. The way our media covers tragedy is too easily mistaken for news even by adults, instead of understood for its true nature: disaster porn.
Disaster porn is exactly what it sounds like —– harnessing human fear and voyeurism to attract advertising revenue without delivering actual news, the same way porn uses your libido for dollars without delivering any authentic action.
No one truly mistakes pornography for real sex, but disaster porn from ABC, NBC, CBS or cable news still wears the title of news, regardless of how much empty –- and oftentimes fictitious –- content these networks spew.
While authorities build a case or search for a suspect, it’s in their best interest to keep all developments within the confines of the investigation. Better that than damage an eventual prosecution, or sift through an even deeper deluge of citizens reporting “suspects” most often guilty of being non-white, strangers, or the worst, non-white strangers. It benefits the case to keep initial information out of the public eye, with the downside of yielding almost nothing to report to the waiting masses.
That does not stop wall-to-wall coverage, which quickly runs out of news before devolving to fact– devoid segments with simply inaccurate conclusions. The New York Post misidentifying two “federal suspects” with a front page spread, CNN falsely breaking the arrest of a Saudi national or notoriously inaccurate eye-witness interviews should never be understood as something other than stimulation designed to prop Nielsen ratings.
One of the major ethical complaints against pornography is the allegation that viewing softer porn leads to more and more extreme versions —– like rape depictions or scat porn. Without detailing all the inadequacies of this assessment, if you find yourself drifting further and further into scat porn —– something else that’s exactly what it sounds like —– you have a problem. Disaster porn’s version of scat porn is the misinformed musings of opinion broadcasts that dominate cable news.
Nothing is inherently wrong with opinion shows, but when already poor reporting meets the editorial broadcast, you have an hour devoted rhetorical scat smearing. No other words can describe Bob Beckel calling for a moratorium on Muslim student visas, or Greg Gutfeld calling Tamerlan Tsarnaev a state sponsored terrorist for temporarily receiving food stamps, or conservative media’s open-armed embrace of conspiracy theorists or Melissa Harris-Perry inferring Islam had no relevance to the attack, needing only days for none other than surviving bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev to refute the claim himself.
The irony of the Internet age’s demand for moment-to-moment news is that often, there is no news to report. It’s as the initial white– hot intensity dies down —– days, weeks, or months removed from the event — – that we learn the identity, motives or group ties of the assailants. Otherwise, disaster porn leaves us with the same feeling as porn –— the sense that a lot was done, when really, we just have a mess to clean up, and an embarrassing history to hide.
Brian Marceau can be reached at [email protected]