I live by it every day as I have to relate to gatekeepers all the time . I understand that there are several criteria the press have in place for something to be newsworthy, that being a gatekeeper is a tricky role because one has to balance commercial interest and news.
But this perplexes me:
It shows a part of human nature at its most inhuman, I think, when the majority of us are more interested in what some deranged austrian did to his daughter, than 100.000 casualties in a country that is run by a military junta that has closed off the country to outsiders and consequently are making sure many more will perish.
It also seems that for a newsstory like this to catch on - to get our sympathyjuices flowing - someone from a first-world country has to be involved, on other words: someone from the first-world has to die.
If they do, chances are the rescue effort and the subsequent media coverage will take on epic proportions. If, by chance, several tourists are involved in a tragedy, there is no end to the lengths of our sympathy and capabilities for action. It seems, brutally, that a westerner's life is worth a thousand third-world ones.
In Nettavisen yesterday on the crisis in Burma, was an article named "why does noone read this story?" that questioned why some obviously tabloidised stories were more frequently read, even in the face of enormous disaster, which means even members of the media are asking why this event has only managed to get people to click on the headline, read a few lines and then go walk the dog or go buy an ice cream and not really care.
So, who do we blame? Sadly, I believe that the mere abundance of information avaliable today and the speed of which we are accustomed to it being updated, has a devastatingly inhumanising effect. The respected sociologist Anthony Giddens says that
'[f]ateful moments are times when events come together in such a way that an individual stands, as it were, at a crossroads in his existence; or where a person learns of information with fateful consequences (Giddens 1991, p. 113).'
The way in which this story is unfolding, seems to me that for most of the western world, the rape of an Austrian girl is more powerful, fateful and devastating than the gruelling death of almost 100.000 burmese people.
This illustrates a core fundamental trait in human beings:
'..if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing (Foucalt 2004, p. 95).'
It also illustrates what people such as the influental scholar Edward Said has been theorising about for over three decades; because of the history of western elightenment, imperialism and subsequently the growth of a western world view which has been adopted globally, westeners are for some reason worth more than "easterners:"
'[s]ince the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric (Said 1978, pp. 25-28).'
Power and discourse are important in this respect, because I think many don't reflect on how they function. According to Foucault, any event can be seen as a a "text." Just as a text has been "authored," any event or situation can be authored, and can subsequently be critically examined in order to reveal the agenda behind it. In this way, any biased event (any event period, really) can become "real" because it is actively produced through discourses of power, in other words the way language is structured around an event by the groupings that are the most influential.
It's a hard pill to swallow, to realise that we can be inhuman sometimes, and therefore I think most people try not to think about it. Therefore, it's important to remember that every time you click a link on a news-website, it is registered, and that means that every person sitting in front of a computer screen has some degree of power over what is represented in front of them. The reason why the letters of a raped austrian girl are more intersting and gets more attention, is the simple fact that people are more inclined to click that link than the one saying a hundred thousand people have been killed, and so the blame really has to placed on each and every one of us.
Bibliography:
Dagbladet.no, 8. may 2008, accessed 09:45
Nettavisen 7. May, accessed 14:50
Giddens, Anthony (1991), Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age.
Michel Foucault, (2004) 'Je suis un artificier'. In Roger-Pol Droit (ed.), Michel Foucault, entretiens.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978)
