In my blog last week about a career in sales, I wrote, “It’s in our DNA to want to help people. Helping people gives our lives purpose, meaning and a sense of satisfaction.”
Yes, we want to help people, but media coverage of all of the concurrent disasters — leaving Afganastan, Covid-19 Delta variant deaths increasing, hurricane Ida, fires in the western U.S., vaccination and mask-wearing denial — is not helping us.
The editors in the news media who make decisions on what news to cover and how to cover it have an impossible dilemma: Which disaster to give front-page, lead-TV-news story most prominence and whether to give overall statistics and numbers or focus on humanizing the story by focusing on a single victim.
Editors know about the identifiable victim effect which indicates that if you want people to get involved emotionally and to give money, it is best to focus on one person such as showing a photo of a forlorn child rather than quoting statistics about a million people needing help. The child is a person, a million people is a just non-personal number. Or as Mother Teresa said, “Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.”
Nevertheless, editors have news to cover: how many people died in the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, how many people have been evacuated, how many people left behind in Kabul, by state what percent of people have been vaccinated, have been hospitalized, how many have died or how many acres have been ravaged by fires. All are non-relatable numbers, but they need to be reported.
But I can’t remember a time in our history (I was born in 1932) when there have been so many disasters happening concurrently. Too many disasters, and, thus, way too many numbers. All the disasters and numbers have numbed me. If the numbers have numbed me, what have they done to journalists? They have to report on the numbing numbers and not get involved emotionally in their stories. It must be really hard.
In the spring and summer of 2020, at the height of the pandemic crisis in New York City, residents our block on East 95th Street came out on our stoops to bang on pots and pans and applaud for essential workers — doctors, nurses, hospital workers, delivery people.
I’d like to find a way to do something to applaud the essential journalists who are hanging in there and covering the multiple disasters for us. Not Fox News, of course. They are making things worse.
Any ideas on how we can applaud these harried newspeople?
