Disaster porn and those viral looting videos

Disaster coverage tends to be cliche: images of a storm or fire, anchors in safari or military garb, a reliance on hyperbole — and the inevitable images of (usually African-Americans) looting some neighborhood store. The story arc is predictable. Once we get past the stories of trapped tourists and occasional resident, we move on to the tsk-tsking of those who were either too stubborn or, more likely, too poor to escape the tragic calamity’s path, followed by stories and images of generally isolated incidents of bad behavior played large.
This is what we’re seeing now, as a handful of looters in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale are writ large and used to make the case that looting is widespread.
Newsweek, for instance, used the arrest of nine in Ft. Lauderdale to proclaim “Looting has begun,” implying a bigger, more ominous crime spree was in the offing. A closer look at the story makes clear, however, that the magazine was relying on the same report nearly every outlet was using — some to underscore racist stereotypes — and that the looting was a minor part of a broader overview of the storm and that looting was far from the norm, a couple dozen arrested in a region of 7 million residents.
Newsweek is not alone — a bevy of news sites around the country relied on the video, along with a slew of conservative web sites for whom the looting underscored the racial scare quotes that is their bread and butter.
These images of looting should be part of the coverage — they happened and are news — but only part. They require context (an admission of their rarity) and should not be sensationalized as they have been. Context unfortunately goes out the window during storms like Irma, as networks battle each other to see who can offer the most salacious pictures to drum up viewers and page view. Bad behavior fits the bill, because it breaks up what quickly becomes generic storm video.
The 24-7 nature of the coverage sadly encourages bad journalism, as does the quest for ratings and clicks. Rather than nuanced coverage that provides usable information or answers thorny or unasked questions, we get what has come to be called “disaster porn,” which John Doyle in the Toronto Globe & Mail defined as “indulg(ing) in endless coverage of destruction,” which, “as with all forms of pornography, is numbing.”
“Viewers,” he adds, “become desensitized and instinctively long for even more dramatic, horrific footage. Perspective is lost, and talk and discussion seems redundant as images dominate.”
The upshot is that discussion of climate change, disaster readiness, and land-use regulations, is ignored as we focus on the mind-numbing repetition that is storm coverage.
Doyle asks viewers to push back:

It’s up to those of us who watch TV to remember how easy it is to be numbed by the saturation coverage of giant waves, collapsing buildings and people clinging to the wreckage. It is up to viewers to think about issues of infrastructure, safety and what obligations governments have. Numbed by over-stimulation from disaster porn, we can fail the planet and ourselves, and all-news TV is just an enabler. When language is beggared by images, it’s time to react by thinking hard.

This sounds great in theory, but the clicks prove that most viewers, despite what they tell us, are willing to devour disaster porn without much thought. It is not the viewers who need to change, but the people who make decisions about news coverage. Rather than just. Having clicks and viewers, we need to remember that we are not just for-profit businesses (and we need to discuss whether the for-profit model is our best hope going forward) but that we offer a public service, and sometimes we need to give viewers and readers what they need and not just what they seem to want.
At the very least, we should end the practice of normalizing the abnormal.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.
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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

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