A Spiritual Season Topic — the Moral Disease of Not Giving a Darn — the American Public’s Unconcern with Death and Wounding in Afghanistan — We Can’t Blame It All on the Media

© 2011 Peter Free

 

27 December 2011

 

 

Media coverage describes our interests — one mirror of who we are

 

Just before Christmas, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reported that the Afghanistan War had received only 2 percent of total media coverage in 2011.

 

 

Citation

 

Journalism.org, The Year in News 2011, Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism (21 December 2011)

 

 

Not flattering

 

According to the Pew Research Center, the top three media stories in 2011 were the economy (20 percent), Middle East turmoil (12 percent), and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami-caused Fukushima Daiichi radiation release (3 percent).

 

Each of these top three subjects immediately concerned our selfish interests — our income (economy), oil prices (Middle East); and potentially our health (Japan’s radiation release).

 

But in Afghanistan, it is mostly other people who are getting blasted.  If they’re Americans, they volunteered to be bomb and bullet fodder and, if they’re not, who cares?

 

Right?

 

 

“Well, it’s the media’s fault, Pete”

 

Probably not.  The media publishes what it can sell.

 

That means our viewing/reading interests are ultimately responsible for the fact that there were only about 7 television reporters in Afghanistan at the end of 2010.

 

 

“But we got ‘war fatigue’, Pete”

 

Undoubtedly.

 

But even seen in this slightly less guilt/shame-inducing way, American war fatigue in recent decades reflects more of a decline in the movie-like “blood and guts” value of war coverage, than it does in an actual appreciation of the evil that war is.

 

The much more likely truth is that we only really care about war, when the possibility exists that our own “sorry behind” is going to be dragged into it.  Then, America’s profligate wasting of its own and other lives suddenly gains personal meaning.

 

If the American military were still operating under the draft, media reporters would be all over Afghanistan.  Just as Vietnam War coverage was non-stop during the Sixties and early Seventies.

 

 

The moral? — Our culture doesn’t look so good, when it disconnects itself from the moral implications of killing — by divorcing itself from bearing the personal risks of the use of deadly force

 

Find me a widely-accepted religion or ethical tradition that disagrees.

 

Then consider this:

 

We have two “One Percents” in this country.

 

The first is the Plutocrat Class, which directs almost everything that happens.  The second is the military’s Honorable Class, which mostly unknowingly acts as the first Plutocrat Class’s imperial spear.

 

The rest of us mostly obsequiously feed the Plutocrat Class — while simultaneously ignoring (a) the Honorable Class’s appalling sacrifices and (b) the collateral damage the Honorables inadvertently sow in yet other peoples’ lives.

 

It would be difficult to come up with a more morally sinister societal system.