Me Me Me

Ok, so here’s what bugs me. I don’t mind that we as Americans feel a need to help the victims of the Tunami. I don’t mind that other nations around the world are grousing that we are not giving enough. What bugs me is how some media outlets are portraying our help. Media outlets right here at home. What bugs me is the New York Daily News.

The News is a tabloid and therefore reliant on the melodramatic paradigm—that which holds that the world is broken down into good guys, bad guys and innocent victims. The post is also more salacious then most other newspapers when looking at disaster. It is in the nature of the tabloids that they love a train wreck. The annoying thing about the News is how they take credit for the relief effort themselves. The front page of today’s News showed a smiling girl who had emptied her piggy bank to help the Tsunami victims, and a headline about a woman who had shared her savings with them. Nothing wrong with that. This is news—not hard news, but news none the less. What bugged me was the headline that thanked all those who had answered the News’s call to help, as if they were somehow in charge of the relief effort. What bothered me was how they inserted themselves into the story. It is not supposed to be a story about what wonderful things the News is doing to help the victims. It is supposed to be a story about the victims. I get annoyed when any newspaper toots its own horn, but especially in an instance of disaster like this.

Jaques Derida said that we are all narcissistic, it’s just that we can practice a kinder, gentler narcissism, and there is something to that. Nobody does anything for purely egalitarian reasons. We may do things because we think they are the right thing to do, but that in itself implies that we put a value on those acts, and value, in the end, is always personal. We give money to the victims of disaster for many reasons—because we are afraid that someday something terrible might happen to us and this helps us to refocus our fear, because we hope that if something terrible does happen to us that someone else will come to our aid, because this part of southern Asia is important to our own economy and it must be rebuilt, because we feel guilt at the conditions these people live in year round as compared to ourselves, and this guilt is focused when we see their suffering, we might do it because we are trying to bank some good will with God in the hopes he’ll let us into heaven, or maybe because we want our reputation to be bolstered by our good deeds, or perhaps it’s because we feel empathy for their suffering and helping them helps to relieve the suffering we feel vicariously through them—we are able to say “well, at least I’m doing something.” Mostly likely we do it just because it makes us feel good personally to help out. We get pleasure and satisfaction from doing good works. It doesn’t matter. Whatever selfish motivation prompts us to help those in need, it’s a good thing.

What is a bad thing is when news organizations exploit the suffering by making the story about themselves. Yes, this is also narcissistic, just as selfish as giving money because it makes us feel good and builds our reputation, but it is so cynical, so exploitative, and so out and out wrong. Yes, for a postmodernist to be saying that the actions of a news organization are flat out wrong may seem a bit hypocritical. So be it. They are.

News organizations are, on at least one level, supposed to exploit misery. It’s how they sell papers. Moreover, by impressing upon people the magnitude of the suffering they spur people to help, and that is good too. But when they cross the line from getting the word out to self aggrandizement, when they make their own philanthropy a part of the story, they have gone too far. The suffering of the sub-continent and the deaths of over 150,000 people may be grist for the mill, and may help the News sell papers, but when it becomes an opportunity for the News to say “hey! Look at us, aren’t we caring and great?” That is going way too far.