Solnit on Typhoon Coverage

You can find an OpEd by Rebecca Solnit on the media coverage of the Philippines disaster here at The Los Angeles Times. She underscores the ways elites and mass media foment anxieties about disorder (looting!!!) and mayhem, fabricating them mostly from whole cloth.

On the Aestheticization of ...

... calamity here in a spread in yesterday's edition of The New York Times. So the question is, do complaints about aesthetization arise only when there are sick, dislocated, deceased, suffering (or whatever) humans in the image? Do disasters have to have already struck in some acute form to be problematic for those who issues such complaints? Or, can the disasters be impending or very slowly underway?

Solidarity not Charity (+ Resentment and Humiliation)

Among the things to which political theorists like Richard Rorty and Avishai Margalit (among others) quite rightly call attention are the ways social and political arrangements - even when they are 'well intentioned' - can generate humiliation. Among the reasons why I find reliance on charity and faith communities in the provision of social services is that they risk doing just that on a systematic basis. If you want a small taste of how this can go have a look at this story at The New York Times. Charity typically comes entangled with pity and disrespect. It requires that we view recipients as 'victims'. Solidarity invokes recognition of others as equals, or at least demands that their interests be accorded equal consideration.

A Clearly Divided CIty

I am not sure why, but I have not seen this image before this evening. Generally I think of New York as little more than an advertising circular much like the ones that appear unsolicited in our rural mail box. But I have to say that this cover image - taken from a helicopter at 5000 feet the night after the recent storm - by Iwan Baan is pretty remarkable. Here are some reflections from the photographer:

“It was the only way to show that New York was two cities, almost . . . One was almost like a third world country where everything was becoming scarce. Everything was complicated. And then another was a completely vibrant, alive New York.

What really struck me, if you look at the image on the left, you see the Goldman Sachs building and new World Trade Center. These two buildings are brightly lit. And then the rest of New York looks literally kind of powerless. In a way, it shows also what’s wrong with the country in this moment.”

 And, of course, Baan's image only captures Manhattan, leaving out the  darkness and devastation in the other boroughs.;

Dangerous Clichés at The Times

Situation getting out of control in Chile’s second largest city. Photo credit.

In a reflection on media coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, Rebecca Solnit remarks:

"Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol."

Yesterday, as if to punctuate her observation, The New York Times ran this Op-Ed by Donald McNeil, one of the paper's staff writers. The essays apparently was prompted by reports of widespread looting following the even more recent earthquake in Chile:

"Nonetheless, a pattern that now is a cliché of disaster journalism broke out there as well: Early reports of people raiding markets for food and diapers were quickly followed by pictures of people carrying TVs and dishwashers off into a city with no electricity. Intact stores were broken into. A department store in Concepción was set ablaze. In a few places, roving bands robbed anyone they could. Residents who formed self-defense posses were quoted saying that the “human earthquake” was worse than the geological one.

[. . .]

By midweek, with thousands of troops deployed, the pictures began shifting: young men spread-eagled on the ground with gun muzzles pressed behind their ears.

All in all, it sounded a lot like Haiti. Or like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Or like Dayton, Ohio, after the 1913 flood. Or like Rome in 410.

It is hard to name a single disruption in the social order, natural or man-made, that has not triggered looting somewhere. [. . .] Though looting starts spontaneously, how quickly it stops appears to depend on how rapid and severe a response it meets. That, in brief, is the argument for using force decisively."

That what McNeil reports is "a cliché of disaster journalism" seems lost on he and the editorial page crew at The Times. Does he question the cliché? Or, does he presume that journalists and their enabling editors and publishers, who nicely conform to the stereotype that Solnit identifies, are getting the story "right"? Professional courtesy, I suppose.

As a start toward thinking rather than regurgitating clichés, McNeil might have read this report from his own paper which suggests that in "New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina" what he calls "the argument for using force decisively" appears, simply put, to have been little more than a rationale for murder and cover-up. The alleged perpetrators are not "looters" but the officers from NOLA police department. Moreover, as these reports [1] [2] from The Nation suggest, the police were hardly the only ones who may have acted murderously. By peddling clichés, The Times is directly perpetuating the distorted ideas that elites use to rationalize violence and panic.

Haiti Digest

Amid the flood of media attention to the Haiti disaster I've noticed three particularly interesting pieces.

First there is this hand-wringing blog post at npr in which the author trots out the standard worries that photos of the disaster are somehow exploitative. There is not much new in the argument, but the comment thread indicates that many people find the worries more or less wholly misplaced. I agree. Do you have any idea what it is like to make your way through streets littered with corpses or pancaked buildings? I don't. The images give us some sense. They help us imagine how horrible conditions really can become.

The second piece is a this blog post by economist Ed Glaeser in which he calls attention to research that identifies a strong relationship between the impact of 'natural' disasters (in terms of mortality) and the prior political-economic circumstances of the relevant countries. He rightly suggests that, in addition to supporting immediate humanitarian intervention, we consider as well how to mitigate the conditions that render 'natural' disasters especially deadly.

Finally, there is this audio interview from the CBC with Rebecca Solnit on panicky elites (including many members of the press) and the assumption that if they are not in control everything must be out of control.
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P.S. (added 1/21/2010): You can find a short essay in which Solnoit covers much the same ground here at Tomdispatch.