Disaster Porn
Oct. 19th, 2017 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tigertoyIt sickens me how much airtime the media spends on "this is so and so who just lost their home and/or their loved ones in the latest disaster, can you please tell us how you feel while can barely keep yourself from crying uncontrollably" garbage. This isn't journalism it's sleazy tabloid garbage exploiting the victims for the sake of emotionally titillating the audience. Disasters are a worthy subject, but what should be covered is explaining what really happened, and more importantly how likely it is to happen again, what we should do to mitigate the risk, and what the economic and political barriers are to doing it.
I knew days ahead of time that Harvey was going to be an epic disaster not because of hurricane winds but because of flooding, based on things that I caught because I know stuff and I was paying attention when they quickly glossed over it. Then after the storm hit, they're incessantly harping on how this was totally unexpected, why didn't we know this was going to happen. We did know it was going to happen, but the media didn't think it was important enough to stress and the country didn't notice.
I knew months ago that we were going to have terrible fires in California, the whole state is tinder dry. I want to hear details on what the local terrain is like to support such an intense fire, and what could be done to make the towns less vulnerable when the countryside goes up in smoke. I don't want to hear how much it sucks to have your house burn down and how terrible it is to come back from the evacuation and see it over and over and over again.
I knew days ahead of time that Harvey was going to be an epic disaster not because of hurricane winds but because of flooding, based on things that I caught because I know stuff and I was paying attention when they quickly glossed over it. Then after the storm hit, they're incessantly harping on how this was totally unexpected, why didn't we know this was going to happen. We did know it was going to happen, but the media didn't think it was important enough to stress and the country didn't notice.
I knew months ago that we were going to have terrible fires in California, the whole state is tinder dry. I want to hear details on what the local terrain is like to support such an intense fire, and what could be done to make the towns less vulnerable when the countryside goes up in smoke. I don't want to hear how much it sucks to have your house burn down and how terrible it is to come back from the evacuation and see it over and over and over again.