Rousing the media audience

ALTHOUGH SOME communication scholars take exception to the findings of a decades-old study that condemns the Wile-y Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon for its violence, other studies have since validated the warning that violence in the media not only tends to be imitated; it also fosters the misconception that the violence audiences see in entertainment media, whether in cartoons or TV and film dramas, are seldom, if ever, lethal. After all, a boulder may fall on Wile-y Coyote, but it doesn’t kill him; and the hero of a TV series or a movie can walk away from a huge explosion, and even survive a hail of high-caliber bullets.

Communication research has also established the desensitizing impact on newspaper and TV audiences of repeated exposure to violence-ridden photographs and videos. Rather than the shock and outrage some editors think such images encourage, constant exposure leads to the opposite: instead of anger, over time what ensues is indifference and toleration. In apparent recognition of this peril, and although the recognition came late, the TV networks and broadsheets have, somewhat inconsistently, recognized the virtues of pixelation and non-publication of gory photos.

The jury is still out on how newspaper, TV, and radio reports on incidents of violence—whether crime, road accidents, or any event in which people are killed and injured—affect readers, viewers and listeners. But anecdotal evidence suggests that constant exposure to reports of violence is likely to have the same long-term effect as exposure to violent or gory images. In a country as haunted by such natural disasters as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, floods, and landslides; and man-made catastrophes such as accidents and the casualty-rich religious and other celebrations characteristic of these islands, reporting the number of dead and injured from these events is understandably a leading concern of the news media.

Reporting the deaths and injuries from natural and other disasters has always been a media focus no matter what the season. But over the last three months since the Bohol-Cebu earthquake last October 15, which was followed by the November 8 Yolanda disaster, reports on the number of the dead and injured from these events have been constant and recurring. News media reports on these disasters were followed in December and January by early morning TV and front page newspaper news on the victims of stray bullets and firecrackers in the advent of the Christmas season, followed almost immediately by reports on the number of  those injured during the Black Nazarene Procession of January 9.

Together with equally frequent reports on robberies, hold-ups, kidnappings, carjackings, rapes, the killing of journalists, and other crimes, news media reports on the casualties from disasters, bus and other vehicular accidents, etc. add up to perceptions of deaths, injuries, and other consequences of disasters and violence so perennial they demand urgent solutions. But instead of provoking alarm and encouraging calls for urgent action, the public tendency has been to shrug these off as normal occurrences about which nothing can be done, and which, therefore, people will just have to live with. Public indifference to the killing of journalists is at least partly due to a misunderstanding of the role of journalists in society. But in general, public indifference confirms  communication research findings that a deluge of information can benumb media audiences rather than rouse them to anger and even action.

This is not to argue for less news about disasters and violence. The news media cannot stop or minimize reporting crimes, disasters, accidents, etc. without surrendering the professional and ethical responsibility of providing information relevant to the lives of the men and women the media are supposed to serve: these are part of the reality relevant to people’s lives. But providing an explanatory and critical background to the news can help mitigate the public’s tendency to get so used to deaths and injuries in the news it shrugs off addressing violence itself as futile. Mere reporting by answering the five Ws  (who, what, why, were, and when) and the H (how) without context doesn’t help readers, viewers and listeners realize either the meaning of a news story or its implications to their lives.

It would have helped for the news media, for example, to provide additional information on why  transport accidents have been recurrent in the country, or how the carnage during every New Year’s eve celebrations can be decisively addressed by banning firecrackers altogether rather than the futile effort of regulating their use, or the roots and meaning of the fanatical devotion to the  feast of the Black Nazarene that yearly always results in injuries to thousands. At the very least, providing both context and a critical perspective would have provoked some thought among news media consumers rather than encouraging the passive acceptance of deaths and injuries as irrevocable conditions of life in the Philippines. At most it could have helped rouse the media audience from the torpor and inertia so much of the media encourages, to a state approaching concern, if not alarm.