Last night I felt strangely comforted watching the ongoing gulf disaster coverage on CNN. It was the video of oil being burned at the the surface of the ocean. Normally that would be an ugly sight, not to mention a reminder of what we do to the atmosphere daily all over the planet. But for some reason it felt like a ray of hope. Of course, they have been burning oil for quite a while in this manner; but for some reason I had not cast eyes on it in that way before. It felt as though I was seeing something new, something positive. That led me to wonder about whether people's perceptions of this tragedy and the response to it are inextricably linked to the narrow pipe of information that is actually visually, viscerally available to us. How much does peeping through the "video keyhole" of traditional media coverage distort our view, our outlook, our assessment of the gulf response ? We consciously think in terms of logic & reason, but the primitive component of a brain decides on a deeper message that depends more on the images flowing into our eyeballs.
Progress ? People can't SEE it. That's may be a big part of the problem. There are no pictures of people actually cleaning up; there are no images of ship armadas burning oil, no mental imagery of a coordinated war fleet. No images from a "mission control" or down at ground zero where people can SEE that things are being done. No photos of an engaged local population working together at doing 'something'. There's just Anderson Cooper standing on that same spot in New Orleans, interviewing the same people every night, saying basically the same things. That's why it's hard to have confidence, an emotional sense of a team working together, and faith in the future. People are told what's being done, but they don't SEE it on the news. I don't even recall seeing that many shots of coastline damage, or how extensive and widespread it currently is. Is that just media laziness, preferring instead to enjoy the Gumbo in new Orleans than travel the swampy coastline ? I don't know. But people want answers, and visual perception is key to giving them a big chunk of that.
We're all familiar with the cable news shows and their tendency to replay the same clips day after day, perhaps shuffled around or re-edited. That, besides helping to give the false illusion of fresh news, also creates the narrative for what's perceived as happening in the gulf. There's another side to the story, i.e. what the administration says is being done; but that narrative has few images... at least not in the national media. People, for all their claims to logic and common sense, need the imagery as a gut check. They need to SEE something to truly believe it. Personally, since I haven't seen many ongoing pictures of the regions affected, I can't know if this cleanup is actually getting done, or what there actually is to be done. Would be nice to digest it with my own eyes.
This may be an unanticipated messaging challenge. That's why some politicians stand on a battleship for a "mission accomplished" photo op. Laugh if you will, but the pictures have real value. And they need not be false propaganda. Furthermore, where is everyone else on this ? Is President Obama to manage and implement this messaging on his own ? Where are the congressional democrats, other party leaders, local leaders, etc. in all of this ? Running for cover ? Waiting to see how it all plays out ? I know they are talking tough on Capital Hill, but I'm talking specifically about the imaging at or near the disaster site. I haven't seem much of anyone's face on TV (except for Obama's) establishing a counter narrative. How about some help from the larger community ? I hope the administration can develop a better plan for this. It's not as though they don't know how; some of these people did it quite well during the 2008 campaign.