i fail to see why the media thinks we give a fuck about natalee holloway, especially a year later. she's just another white, middle-class girl to go missing. of course i understand why it's a big deal in aruba and in the local area where she came from, and naturally those who knew her are grieving, but there is no reason for it to be a national "problem", "issue", whatever you want to call it.
Anonymous
03:17:18 PM
7 comments:
it is a problem, but the media is portraying its signifigance as an individual occurance, not as a societal detriment. the type of attention that is paid to that particular case is not worthy of a front-page-of-CNN flare every time somebody gets questioned or her mother bitches about people's insensitivity. the story, as it is currently run, deserves to be followed in a local paper or tv news, not by the media giants of america.
not the op.
I personally think that the media thinking we care about Katie Couric going who knows where is much more ridiculous.
The fact that one drunk, reckless girl goes missing on a random jaunt to a foreign country is nothing to compared to the other countless thousands that have died since her disappearance. Who foots the CNN airtime for all of those dying of disease, hunger, genocide all across the world? Think how many voices were silenced all because this girl and her relatives have hogged the stage. I suppose the Natalee story was so popular because it allowed the major news cycle to jam our sympathy buttons while avoiding anything to real or genuinely disturbing, but at this point the country's just turned from sorrow to "shut it, I don't give a damn".
of course not, pchis.
the other anons got it.
I got it, but what I'm saying is that her occurance IS important.
Our "sympathy buttons" are exactly what need to be jammed. When I hear how thousands of africans are dying from AIDS or how many hundreds of women get raped every minute of the average day, it makes the problem seem huge and unsolvable, and it reverts everyone to a statistic. Natalee is not just one of those random women who go missing, she's a person with family and friends that care deeply for her. All this coverage allows you to really identify with the woman and not the problem. When you see this story you can extrapolate those sad feelings of seeing one woman and thinking "shit, thousands like that..."
It's not the only coverage and after this it won't be another kidnapping story, so I think it's important that we're exposed to this.
"I think it's important that we're exposed to this."
Exactly! So we can get up off of our couches and....oh look, Lost is on....
...speaking of Lost and good tv, did anybody see the episode of 24 last monday?
regardless, this is exactly the point the op was trying to make. ideally, overexposure to a sympathetic situation creates a softer mindset in the audience, open to championing causes. but in practice, the media just juices cases like this because they know enough people will watch and listen, despite the fact nobody will look at the big picture.
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