A Broken Record of a Tragedy

Now I know that my last post was similar to this one but bear with me.

Today I sat in my Politics of war class and sat down to a lector on the Iraq war. Unfortunately my professor is quite ill and has almost no voice and so he told us we would have to do most of the talking.He requested that we gather into small groups and list what we knew about the war. We had simple questions to answer: what kind of war was it , who the combatants and what was the Surge etc etc. Now I do not claim to know a whole lot about the Iraq war in all it's complexity. I am aware of the fighting between the Sunni and Shiites and the US alliance with most of the Shiites. Besides that and a bit about the  Al-Qaeda, I'm not aware of a whole lot , still I got into the group of International Relations students assuming i was about to be informed. Strangely however , no one in my group knew a whole lot. Hardly anything , in fact. When the professor asked the class as a whole to share there was a heavy silence in the room. 

I was horrified. In a class of college students, most of whom are studying international relations, no one knew the specifics of the war. They could not even tell you what it is about. 

What kind of a country are we living in where the people don't even know why their soldiers are dying? Why is the media printing papers with celebrity marriages and dirty politicians social lives when there is a war going on that no one knows anything about? Why is it that news broadcasters are telling me about tests on organic vegetables and yet americans are being slaughtered and 90,000 refugees are driven from their homes every month?

The Public Eye

We have learned that one of the factors that dictates news is the interest of readers. One of the things that falls into this category is fame. People want to read about famous people : celebrities , politicians etc. Thousands of average people begin and end relationships every day but the only ones that get spread out on a magazine are the ones that are started and ended by people we see in the movies. A woman down the street from where I used to live embezzled money from town hall but it wasn't in any magazines , but if any famous politician tried to pull that trick their face would be one the news for weeks. This is a both beneficial and detrimental. While I cannot find any good reason to poke our nose into the personal life of overpaid actors I do think its good to know more about politicians. People need to know about the people with power in their local area. The detriment is found when you consider where the focus of the common people is being placed. For instance , hundred of people have read about Eliot Spitzer and his use of prostitutes. Its all over the news and internet and people everywhere are shaking their head and looking down on this obvious infringement on new York State law. Still , with the statistics of rape being what they are , why is the media focusing on one man having sex with a willing person? You can theorize that perhaps if the media focused on the unwilling victims and rapist's stories then maybe we could lower the statistic. Perhaps this is the detriment of drawing public focus , the detriment of idolization of the famous. 

Tunnel Vision

So I know that on election day , as history is being made I ought to write my blog on the impeding presidency. Still , I wanted to use this post to look back at past presidential decisions influenced by the media. 

Let me take you back to 1992 to one of the few "humanitarian" war decisions made in the U.S. 

What defines a Humanitarian intervention is a lack of personal gain for the country that intervenes.  But it raises the question "why go to war if there is no personal gain?". This is why humanitarian intervention doesn't happen often (or one could argue ...ever). 

So if people don't just send troops into a hostile place out of the goodness of their hearts, Why did Bush decide to provide relief to Somalia? The answer lies in the media and public opinion.

While somalia was undergoing famine crisis , there was also trouble brewing (well...boiling over actually) in The Balkans. Bosnia was being torn to pieces by serbian armies and the UN provided little help. So with all the pleas for help echoing out of Yugoslavia why did the president decide to send troops to Somalia? 

The answer is simple. The News began running pictures of starving people on the 6 o'clock slot. Happy American families were just sitting down to dinner when they were presented with horrific pictures of skeleton like children gleaming out from their television sets. The public response was passionate. People wanted something to be done , and as Bush had led a rather unspectacular Presidency he saw a chance to make a name for himself. 

1.5 somalians were expected to die from starvation , because of the intervention only 50,000 to 100,000 actually died. All because of some pictures in the media.