These Trying Times
Outrage and Circuses
October 5, 2017
I’ve been trying to scale Mount To Be Read on my bedside table to balance my diet of breaking news, most of it catastrophic and dramatic. (A tip for those who face a similar struggle: I deleted Twitter from my phone, and it’s astonishing how much time that has added for reading longer form texts – and how much it has helped me relax at night.) Today I realized how much the two books I most recently finished have helped me make sense of the news – not the events themselves, but the ways they are covered by the media and the ways they are circulated and amplified on social media.
First there was the catastrophe of Hurricane Maria, hard on the heels of Texas and Florida being hit. It’s a hard story for journalists to cover. Getting around is difficult, and grasping the daily lived experience of nearly four million American citizens living in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands who can’t participate in federal elections and are frequently forgotten makes it even harder because there’s not a general public knowledge base to build on. You have to start with “yes, these are Americans.”
(While I haven’t heard this point made in news broadcasts, it seems important that Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands have a larger population than 21 of our states and more than the population of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota added together. Imagine if Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands had 10 senators. Or if the District of Columbia, which has a higher population than either Wyoming or Vermont, had two. No wonder we forget these people are Americans – they’re literally disenfranchised, and they are mostly not what we consider white folks: “Hispanics” can be white or black according to the way we conduct our census, but we mostly think of them as not white.)
That’s all background that is not well known but hard to fit into a broadcast news segment. You also have to work pretty hard to get the visuals broadcast news depends on if the roads are blocked and the airports are struggling to land planes. On top of that, broadcasters don’t have the wealth of social media imagery to draw on. Most of the cell towers were knocked out and power remains off for most of the residents and will be out for months to come. The more journalism relies on social media streams, the more likely whole parts of the planet will vanish from our awareness. The only thing that seems to keep it at the forefront is the non-stop coverage of the president’s tweets attacking the mayor of San Juan and Puerto Rico for being poor and in debt. His pals on Wall Street are not too happy with him for casually saying we should erase that debt – something that actually makes sense, but dollars carry more weight and financial institutions have a huge impact on public policy.
If you’re wondering how government got so caught up in the well-being of Wall Street, I have a book for you: A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David H