And Now for a Word
When something tragic happens on a large scale, my first instinct is to shut up. A lot of people like to go on social media to wish the victims and their families well, or to spread information, but I just can’t do it. Enough people spread the information without my adding more noise – and the Boston explosions have led so far to more speculation than answers – and however much I would like to offer my sympathies and condolences to human beings in pain, something about doing so online rings hollow to me. I’m just a stranger to these people. Those affected aren’t likely to ever even read my words, much less care what I have to say. Expressing my sadness on their behalf without communicating it to them feels … indecent somehow.
Please, note that this is just my hang-up, and has no bearing on who you are, what you feel, or what you say online.
Part of me says that I should proceed with business as usual, posting silly thoughts on Twitter or yakking about roleplaying games, speculative fiction, and the Giants as though nothing had happened. But that feels disrespectful, as though I were saying that because the tragedy didn’t affect me directly, it didn’t matter.
So I shut up. I wait a day or two, and watch the news sometimes, when I think they have something real to say. And I wonder. I wonder about the people who did it, what they wanted, how they planned it, how they picked their target and timing, and most of all what could motivate someone to do something so heinous. I wonder about our politicians and their triplet reactions: wanting to do something, wanting to spin the event for political gain, and wanting to slip in other agenda while no one is looking.
Most of all this time I wonder about the media. The ratings-driven, get-them-watching/keep-them-watching media. They give us cameramen who center shots on suffering children. They give us talking heads who claim not to spread rumors while naming every rumor they won’t spread. They speculate ad nauseum, then give us “expert analysis” of their speculation, lending credence in the minds of viewers to the idea that they have actual information.
And that doesn’t include the outlets that are nothing more than propaganda machines spewing political rhetoric.
I wonder whether the news was ever as good and honest as people like to think it was. Or maybe, like with politicians, the information age has simply shown us a look behind the curtain at what has been there all along – people crafting public information to suit their personal needs. I don’t mean that every person involved in the media is evil. I just mean that the end result always seems to slant toward the money, one way or another.
Somewhere around this point, I usually get depressed, and seek distraction. This time it led me to a realization: there is no accurate way to model our news media in fiction. Anything the writer does will seem to the reader to be better or worse than the real thing.
Consider Babylon 5’s ISN. They were a solid, reliable source of journalism, the way most of us like to think the news used to be. Then ISN was forced to serve the government’s political agenda, as a way of demonstrating to viewers the government’s corruption. Then, when ISN is later freed from the government, this is a cause for celebration, a sign of freedoms returned.
How different would the show have been, had Straczynski chosen instead to require his characters to sift through a variety of news sources to figure out what was really happening in the galaxy? To strip away for themselves the political and financial agenda?
But I guess that’s why they say that fiction is life without the boring parts. Here in the real world it’s not so simple.
