CNN's Hurricane Addiction
I wrote a little piece for TomPaine.com on Anderson Cooper's tear-filled hurricane reportage for CNN. (Hint: I'm not a fan.) I'll link to the piece when it's up. Meantime, I wanted to take another shot at CNN.
In the past few days, the news network has been splitting its screen to provide more hurricane drama. On the right side, reporters talk about New Orleans, etc. On the left, CNN provides a steady stream of names, ages, and photographs of children reported missing in Hurricane Katrina. Watching this, I was bothered by it, though I couldn't quite put my thumb on why. It only occurred to me when I realized that the network doesn't have pictures of many of the children, so it just runs a generic black profile of a child.
What possible good could it do to run the name and age of a missing child without running a picture? Try to think of a scenario where knowing that seven-year-old Rhonda Owens (to make up a name) is missing is actually going to help you find her.
In fact, what really is the chance that, even when the network has a photo of the missing child, any good will come from the network's milk carton-like strategy?
Let's say you're wandering through an abandoned house in New Orleans and you happen to come across a child who's somehow been living there for the past two weeks. You probably don't need CNN to tell you that something's wrong. So what's the point?
And I realized that the missing child slide show bothered me because, under the guise of helping kids, CNN is just trying to milk this story for all the melodrama it's worth, exploiting the fact that there are numerous missing children, some of whom are probably dead.
It's a little gross, when you think about it....
