"Four men charged with publicly stoning Iraqi girl."
"Father microwaves baby."
The above headlines, taken from a recent list of headlines from CNN, seem to tell us just how terrible and savage life really is. It seems little wonder that so many of us simply focus on our day to day lives without trying to worry about the larger world. It seems just too much to deal with.
The first story from Iraq relates the death of a girl who was bludgeoned to death because her attackers thought she had converted to a different sect of Islam because she had been seen talking with a man of that sect. Before we can dismiss such horror as only happening somewhere out there, we have the other story right here in America. A man, who, ironically enough, claimed he had come to the area looking for a job as a pastor, intentionally burns his two-month old daughter in a hotel microwave.
Is it little wonder then, when we combine such an awful reality with a constant bombardment by advertisements, that we see so many people grabbing their iPods and tuning out the world around them? We might feel like such news is certainly terrible - but what can I do about it? Before we shut out the larger world completely there are some things we all have to remember.
The news by its very nature distills reality. In a world with radio, television and the Internet we are constantly being bombarded with information and to function we learn to shut much of it out. News and advertisements have to then try to force their way past that barrier, which is why you see advertisements getting more bizarre in an attempt to make you remember their product.
Likewise, the news can't be built on the uneventful. So the news has to pour out the worst of the worst or the best of the best for their particular audience in a struggle to hopefully get their audience's attention.
This unfortunately becomes a case of what I call the airplane crash effect. If we were to think about which vehicle we would die in if a crash happened, we tend to worry more about an airplane than our cars. However, as Ali Khounsary, Ph.D. in the Newton Science Archives notes, "In the U.S., each year there are about 40,000 deaths per year in automobile accidents versus about 200 in air transport."
Despite being far more likely to die in a car accident on your way to work, we don't think like that each time we start up our car. A car crash is relatively a common occurrence in comparison to a plane crash, so the plane crash is what gets covered as a major new story. It is this prevalence of seeing plane crashes on the news that makes us think that it's more likely to happen to us.
In relation to what I just said, the stories we hear of terrible murders on the news are in some ways a result of probability. Somewhere at some time, something terrible happens. When it does, it's the media's job to catch it and make us aware of it, but that also makes us hyper-aware of one event out of countless uneventful happenings in the world.
Does that mean we should just disregard the story of a girl's death in Iraq as a case of random chance? No, because to do that is to deny the reality of her suffering and death. Let's not shut out the terrible things that come to us in the news, but rather put them into perspective. If the world seems filled with terrible things, it isn't, but when they do happen we need to respond rather than shutting the world out.
Write to Aaron at amfleming@bsu.edu
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