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As the number of casualties following the tsunamis that struck Southeast Asia and parts of East Africa reaches higher each day, I find myself falling prey to one of the most unpleasant side effects of 24-hour television and Web news coverage: an addiction to death toll pornography.
As the numbers grow, my compassion seems to diminish. Initial horror upon hearing the news has morphed into an urge to hear more updates and to see more video footage of massive waves washing away cars, hotels, boats and, in case we forget, people. As the numbers rocket upward, I play a macabre guessing game. How high will the death count go?
I can only speak for myself, of course, but my guess is that I’m not alone in my occasional addiction to death toll pornography. I have come to the conclusion that I’m watching the aftermath of this natural disaster for reasons other than pure information.
What jolted me out of my self-deception – and brought me to write this article – was something I saw this morning on the BBC. In the middle of some stock crisis footage from Thailand there was a brief shot of the naked corpse of a young man hanging from the branch of a tree. The fact that I was sitting in my comfortable living room drinking coffee, looking at a naked corpse in a tree, convinced me that what I was watching was not news but a perverted form of reality television. I wondered how I would feel if that naked boy had been a member of my family, his undignified death a passing spectacle for all the world to see over their mugs of morning coffee.
The bigger the number of victims and the further away they live from us, of course, the easier it becomes to distance ourselves from what we’re watching. We can accept video of hundreds of anonymous bodies washing up onto the shores of southern India, but would we tolerate images of the corpse of a young girl floating in a neighbourhood swimming pool being shown on our local news? On the news, we’ve become accustomed to seeing people in the developing world as victims: victims of war, victims of famine, victims of disease and victims of natural disasters. In their eternal state of victimhood, these people have had their right to individuality and dignity stripped away, and thus their corpses are fair game for the evening news.
None of this is to say that the tsunami is not a story worthy of round-the-clock coverage, because it is. What I am suggesting, however, is that we should be thinking about the mode of the coverage: the obsession with death tolls (most of which are inaccurate anyway), the repetitive airing of horrific footage and close-up pictures of obviously grieving family members.
Coverage of the crisis is needed to alert the world to a massive humanitarian disaster, and showing death is a part of that. What is not needed, however, is coverage that panders to the dark, voyeuristic side of our psyches.
