I can’t sleep, so naturally, I’m reading the news. I just finished reading this story on the BBC’s website about medical response during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina (Rescuers Battle Chaos and Confusion, by Matthew Davis). The part that caught my eye was the following:
Three days ago Dr. Judice was in the New Orleans Superdome, fighting to treat an ever-growing list of patients amid horrifically unhygienic conditions.
“We were delivering babies in the dark, with nothing more than a flashlight,” he said. “People with chronic illnesses needed treatment, but they did not know the names of their medications.
“We were treating lacerations that were getting infected, people were dying of heart attacks – all the while working in such an unsanitary place.”
The part about delivering babies in the dark was pulled out of the text and written larger and in bold as a stand-out quote about halfway down the page. Now, I wonder why they chose that quote in particular to highlight? Is the thought of delivering babies in the dark with a flashlight so extraordinarily scary that it was chosen as the shock-quote to grap attention and express how dire the situation had become? More scary than people dying from lack of ventilation because there’s no electricity, or flowing 02, or heartattacks when no one can get their hands on a defibrillator? True, delivering a baby with only a flashlight, and no warm blankets or suction or gloves or sutures, might be a bit extreme, but I wonder if the reason it’s so disturbing to people is because of our culture’s insistence that birth can only happen in a hospital, with tons of medical assistance and equiptment? The idea of birth happening out of a hospital, with nothing more than a flashlight, has been culled out of the text as the best example of how absolutely desperate and shocking the situation has become, and how badly the normal order of things has broken down. Women giving birth on their own without drugs or a hospital! Shocking!
I’m sure I’m making a big deal out of something that was probably a throwaway quote, or just a random editorial decision, but hey, it’s late (well, early, but I am on night-shift time at the moment), and I’m overtired, and hyper-analyzing news articles is fuuuuuuuuun.
3 Comments
It’s because the news industry in our country values emotional manipulation over realism, and cute, widdle babies are one of their favorite emotional triggers. Why talk about how W inentionally vital storm protection work in Louisiana when we can show dramatic black & white photo essays of people suffering with heartfelt music swelling in the background? Why ask news anchors and reporters to dispute W’s blatantly untrue assertion that nobody , (does this remind anyone else of his claim that nobody ever dreamed that terrorists would fly jetliners into skyscrapers, or is it just me?) when we can show them sighing and shaking their heads empathetically for hours on end? And why ask hard questions about why the response from the Bush administration has been so slow and ineffective when we can talk about all those poor little babies instead? Don’t get me wrong, I think that the people who have been affected by this situation really do deserve every ounce of sympathy we have, and help, but not at the expense of our intelligence and critical thought.
Yes, I completely agree with you. The media doesn’t ask questions any more, and doesn’t go after the hard stories. Sort of like everyone just gobbled up the “Iraq has WoMD” line, and no one thought to really see if that was the case until many many months later, after we’d already gone to war. And yes, the similarity to 9/11 is depressing and disgusting; it’s as if we’re not learning from our mistakes. As you may have realized by now, I’m not a big fan of this administration AT ALL; to my way of thinking, at least the one good thing that may come out of such terrible suffering and tragedy is that the ignorance, lack of compassion, and complete incompetence of this administration is finally visible to many of its previous supporters.
You tell it sister! I’m less optimistic than you are about this (or anything) waking most Americans up about the true natures of the Bushies, but this is for anyone who still believes we went to Iraq for WMDs. Or, for a really scary read, try “Worse than Watergate” by John W. Dean. Yes, Nixon’s John W. Dean.