Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Eight days from the earthquake in Haiti and we still have wall to wall coverage on BBC and CNN. Seems that every broken building has one reporter crawling around in search of a battered corpse to show to an audience morbidly fascinated with blood and suffering. Much like a crowd gathers to gawp at an accident where a person is bleeding to death but does nothing to help. Often the news is prefaced by, ' the following pictures may be disturbing ' calculated to attract the ghouls excited by pictures of people reduced to begging for water and resorting to looting to stay alive. Anything to increase eyeballs and profits from commercials. The question that comes to mind is that if these voyeuristic reporters can fly in with all their gear and can find transport to roam around wherever they please without seemingly being hindered by lack of infrastructure then why are aid people unable to land at the airport and no aid is reaching the vulnerable. The most sickening is when they glorify a survivor being pulled out alive by their countrymen and the touching gratitude expressed by the victim. Twice a victim because of being buried alive by the earthquake and because of the shameless exploitation of the vulnerability of the person. I understand that Dr. Sanjay Gupta of the CNN has operated on a 12 year old girl with a head injury and she survived. How much will they milk the poor child?

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