Post-disaster media event

THE MEDIA have not tired of declaring, in the aftermath of any disaster, that adversity brings out the best in the Filipino. Like all generalizations it is only partly true: Disasters like floods and earthquakes also bring out the worst in people. Despite price controls, the usual anti-social tradesmen see nothing wrong and everything right in jacking up the prices of prime commodities. To the reality of suffering and need they respond with  price gouging—as do some taxi and tricycle drivers, who see rain and flood as opportunities for easy pickings rather than threats, or as a chance to reconnect with the rest of humanity.

As bad as these instances of profiting from suffering are, the practice of some politicians of distributing among the huddled masses in evacuation centers relief goods with their names and faces prominently stamped on the usual bags of instant noodles and sardines, is arguably worse, primarily because it is not only an attempt to curry votes during a calamity, it also targets people at their most vulnerable.

The media have since learned not to give these eminent examples of bad taste and worse politics either space or time. The result is a waning of the practice except among the most stubborn of local politicians, some of whom, during the monsoon rains last week, insisted still on putting their names and faces on everything from bags of rice to bottled water.

What the media still cover are celebrity relief efforts as well as their own. Some of these efforts at least are as self-serving as those of the politicians’, but have not met with the same disdain. Relief goods recipients have been quoted as declaring that the presence of celebrities and of media representatives among them has lifted their spirits, for example, while, on the other hand, the same recipients have expressed their dismay over politicians’ using disasters to advertise themselves.

The obvious question is whether, in the context of disasters, the motives behind relief efforts matter. It should be evident that every effort to ease suffering should be welcomed. But there is a difference between politicians’ using disasters to advance their electoral aims—and what’s more, most probably using public funds in the process—and such private efforts as those of celebrities and media organizations. One suspects that although unarticulated, the sense that in the first instance disaster victims are being made to feel grateful to this politician or that for being provided relief with public, meaning their own, funds, drives the disdain and even contempt for such efforts among the victimized.

On the other hand, media organizations’ providing relief is consistent with the widespread belief among the public that the media can do more than provide information, as has become evident in the popularity of the public service programs to which citizens have become used to appealing whenever they feel aggrieved, or expect government action on matters that concern them.

Approval of celebrity involvement in relief operations, meanwhile, is an extension of citizens’ perceptions of these personalities as the true-to-life heroes and heroines they portray in the movies and television dramas. It explains the noticeable absence of movie and television villains in the relief operations the media cover, and the overwhelming presence instead of young, up and coming stars and TV anchors—in general, the well-scrubbed ideals of popular culture. The aftermath of disasters in the Philippines is in many ways a media event beyond the disaster itself.