To experience an earthquake or a tsunami is hard enough for any nation, but to cope with both of these natural disasters and then have to respond to the threat of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant and the prospect of an uncontrolled release of radiation represents an exceptional challenge.
As if the effects of this compound disaster aren't enough to contend with, the people who are part of the rescue effort, or trying to get things working again, or trying to find missing members of their family, or simply just trying to stay alive also have to put up with the world's media arriving by the planeload, looking for ever more dramatic things to film for the rest of us to watch on our 50 inch plasma TVs.
Every news crew wants an exclusive, so the temptation to squeeze more drama into any report must be hard to resist and it would take a very special kind of news editor to lead with the facts from a well informed source when they have some grim video footage, accompanied by an apocolyptic commentary by "their reporter at the scene of devastation", to open their news bulletin with a doom-laden splash.
Well I don't trust them. I don't believe that they can bear to let the facts spoil what, to them, is just another story. I particularly don't trust news-mongers to tell us anything reliable if it involves science.
I don't want to get my news from these monkeys.
If, like me, you want to find out what's really going on at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, you might like to take the advice of Charles Stross, and have a look at the International Atomic Energy Agency site. The situation is clearly presented, without any tabloid melodrama, by people who are a whole lot better qualified to explain this complex and continually evolving situation than a bunch of TV journalists who know more about camera angles than containment vessels.
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Almost the first thing that came to mind when events started in Japan just the other day was this: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/02/23/3146945.htm
ReplyDeleteYes. Depressingly, that pretty much sums it up.
ReplyDeleteNote:
Sadly, although Shane Tomlin was rescued, he subsequently died from his injuries.
There's a very rather lovely piece about him, at:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-earthquake/4732152/Quake-victim-Shane-Tomlin-farewelled
Good blog! My normally upbeat writing was kind of a parallel to yours this past week. I think what your are saying is a pervasive truth. Many hearts are feeling the same things on a global scale.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your kind thoughts.
ReplyDelete...and the compliments too :)