Saturday, March 27, 2010

Why does it have to be another tragedy before it gets attention?

The following is a quote from an article on the Huffington Post site by investigative journalist Georgianne Nienaber that I mentioned here in a previous post:  Haiti: Diarrhea Threatens Infants and "We Are in Reaction Mode Instead of Planning Mode."    I'm coming back to it because I actually spoke with Georgianne - and the more I know, the more I seriously cannot understand why the media is so quiet on this:

"What should the mainstream media do when the guy who identified the H1N1 outbreak in Mexico and was a key player and founder of ARGUS, a global detection and tracking system for the early detection of biological events, says Haiti is facing a serious gap in preparedness, early warning, and rapid response regarding pediatric diarrheal disease? If they are doing their homework, they talk to him and other epidemiologists and doctors in the field who say that the big NGOs and the United Nations are fudging the facts about their accomplishments.

While in Haiti, we met Dr. Jim Wilson, who among other things, has tracked and identified SARS outbreaks, H1NI, Marburg hemorrhagic fever, and issued the first warning of H1N1 resurgence in the United States in the summer of 2009. Remember the melamine contaminated baby food scandal in China? Well, he was the one who first detected it through via reporting of unusual renal disease in babies there. He has offered testimony to Congress on the Argus Program and to Homeland Security. In the late 1990's, Wilson worked with the World Health Organization and NASA to examine environmental and climatic activities in Africa potentially associated with the emergence of the Ebola virus ....
As Wilson reports on his website, and contrary to what the United Nations and Care International have reported , about safe drinking water and sanitation in the IDP camps, the opposite is true."

It's a sad testimony to what's happened to journalism in this country when something like this just sits ignored - tucked into nooks and crannies of Blogs on the internet - until ... it blows up into a horrible disaster that will boost ratings, draws advertisers and only then suddenly has news organizations and  "professional journalists" fighting to cover it.

I shall date myself and say as a child it was Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite on the television every night so I'll grant you I grew up with an entirely different standard for news, but one I think we should go back to. I don't watch the news anymore; I gather my information from trusted sources on the internet.

Seriously ... can this predicted potentially deadly outbreak be prevented or at least the consequences substantially minimized with pro-active steps now please? We're talking kids being the most vulnerable. Do they really have to die first to get attention?

I know this is all overwhelming and more than a little depressing. The world is full of problems and we all certainly have our own personal things to deal with. Pick a disaster Susan, they're everywhere in the world.

Sigh, yes, yes they are ....

But ever notice when really horrendeous things happen like the Haitian earthquake and we all get inundated with it on the news and it starts to take over conversations in the course of the day because it's such a big deal and we get concerned and care because for that little while it all has our attention we relate and we realize "there but for the grace of ... go I" and the celebrities come out and sing to us about it and we all get a little bit of that fuzzy "gee, maybe we really ARE all one" feeling listening to/watching them and so we're motivated to help and we do which is wonderful, and we send in our donation and we feel a bit better and then our own lives start to take priority again and disaster fatigue sets in and we really would rather kind of move on and not think about it much anymore because it's depressing, and the news media knows that so they move on too and find something else to grab our attention with so their ratings stay up there and the advertisers stay put and therefore the poor place and people who had that horrendeous disaster and are still living/dying/coping with that horrendeous disaster start having to deal with the consequences of not being the headline news of the day anymore and getting the help that always brings until ... because of the fact that the help starts to dissipate and things aren't dealt with and so another huge disaster on the human scale comes as a result of lack of attention and help which inevitably results in the loss of even more lives and the creation of yet more dramatic photo ops at which the media goes "gee, look, more horrible things are happening here" that are dramatic and interest-holding and will make our ratings go up ... and the cycle starts all over again? Know how that is?

Well ... how about we try not to let that be the case this time.

I'm sorry this sounds so jaded and negative. But actually it isn't. Why?

Because I believe we're better than that ~ it's why I wrote this.

(A project Medishare medical relief worker offers a chocolate bar to a child outside the airport based Medishare Hospital in Port au Prince 3/6/10)

No comments:

Post a Comment