Sunshine

Cloud formations during monsoon weather in Mountainair, NM, August 2008

Since I don't have teevee here and haven't picked up a paper for a while, and since my internet connection is a slow dialup, I'm kind of cut off from the concerns of The World. The News comes from the radio, primarily NPR, but over the weekend, there wasn't a lot of news on the radio. Instead, there were a lot of features, some of which were very interesting (such as the crypto-Jews of Bernalillo), but which didn't really touch on the Big Stories, like the earthquake in Chile.

I've noticed since the weekend that reporters are having to struggle with the difference between their Narrative of What Happened in Chile, and what they're finding on the ground. The First Narrative was that though the earthquake was far more severe in Chile, there was little damage, hardly any compared to Haiti, because the building standards were so much higher in Chile (subtext: they're White, you know). The Narrative insisted that these Chileans were so much calmer and so much better behaved than those dirty Negroes in Haiti, and they were so much better organized to provide the necessary assistance to the affected regions, they didn't really need international assistance. (subtext: so much better to be Chilean than Haitian, what luck, eh?)

The initial reports were coming from Santiago, where apparently some older buildings collapsed, but the newer ones were mostly fine, and everyone was very well behaved, even snarky, about the earthquake and its aftershocks, and this sanguinity was assumed to be the way things were throughout the country.

The major area of damage and disruption was in and around Concepcion, which of course was inaccessible. Nevertheless, because the Narrative said that things were mostly fine in Chile, reporters took their time getting to the region. Besides it was hard. The roads were impassable. Bridges were down. The airport was closed. They had to go through Argentina. It took a while.

But everything was fine.

They saw little damage, and they heard the death toll was modest, a few hundred. Nothing like the massive death toll in Haiti. So it was like sightseeing for the reporters.

Who finally got to Concepcion, and said: WTF?

Damage in some areas was severe. Hundreds of thousands were homeless. There were no services of any kind. The Government was not providing any food or water, no shelter, nothing, and big aftershocks were continuous. Looting had commenced, and some of the reporters were referring to the looters as "gang members," or "gang leaders." The people were angry and frightened.

The military was sent in to establish order and stop the looting. Most of which was food and water from the markets, but some of which was teevees and toaster ovens. Which can't be tolerated, not in a civilized society. The military arrived, and still provided nothing -- except a show of force to keep the people from salvaging food and water and teevees and toaster ovens from the debris.

The reporters were grateful, as they always are, for the military presence to keep the people at bay, but still they were confused, because their Narrative was that there were no serious problems and destruction was modest, and the people were behaving. And that isn't what they were seeing on the ground, and they didn't know how to report it.

Rather than abandon the Narrative, they tried to blend it with what they were seeing with their own eyes and with what they were hearing from the population. Often their reports were hesitant to say the least, as they groped for words to express their understanding of conditions and what was really going on without violating the Narrative they were supposed to be reinforcing.

There was a tsunami, for example, that did terrible damage along the coast, but there was nothing at all said about it for many days, in part, perhaps, because the Narrative said that the tsunami warning was cancelled and people around the Pacific were annoyed and upset that they had had to prepare for a tsunami that never came.

Of course, I understand that my news is filtered through many layers while I'm here, and much of it is fragmentary at best. And of course by now everyone should be aware of how dominant The Narrative is in the news business, for everything, not just major disasters.

But it's still something of a shock to see it so bare in the case of Chile, and to hear how hard it is for reporters to actually report what's going on when what is really going on diverges so much from The Narrative.

So my question is, what will it take to bring the Sunshine of Truth into the news business? Or is it hopeless? Is it necessary to report on the basis of a Received Narrative to begin any big story, and then adjust it as "more facts come in?" Is this the way it has to be? Has it always been this way?

We fret about the propagandistic nature of much of our news. Yet so far, there isn't really another model that has any traction. The alternative media, including the blogging media, provides a different perspective (sometimes) but it is often as locked into its own narrative, and struggles just as hard with the Truth and telling the Truth if the Truth diverges from the Alternative Narrative.