For weeks we have seen every detail of the lives of those 12 boys
who were rescued from that cave in Thailand. It was a remarkable story. It was
a story with a happy ending. It was newsworthy. But where the minute by minute
details and day long coverage really worth it?
In the last several years our mainstream news media seem to look for
"heroes" they can honour for various acts of courage under siege,
whether related to weather, terrorism or just plain old crime. It's as if our
capitalist system has a deficit of heroes to worship and our mainstream news
media is looking to fix that situation.
There are children in trouble all over the world. There are
refugees, children who go hungry, children who live in deep poverty or other
man-made forms of injustice. These children's stories could easily make good
and important news stories. Also, the coach who took these children into a cave
right before the rainy season, did something very stupid and yet he gets made
into a hero.
The following story looks into the hype related to the kids in the
cave story. This story asks a lot of good questions that a lot of journalists should
have been asking. -SJ Otto
From NPR:
Like
millions of global citizens, Abraham Leno has been riveted by the story of the
12 boys and their soccer coach trapped in a cave in Thailand.
"I
sat around the radio with my family and we wanted to hear the recent updates of
the kids, every little detail," he says. "To see all the governments
sending their best divers, giving them equipment, offering their moral support
— it was a beautiful thing to see."
But
Leno has another perspective. As a youth, he spent ten years in refugee camps
in Guinea. Now working at the American
Refugee Committee, he wishes that the media had paid more attention to his
plight and his fellow refugees: "It would have shed a better light to
create the understanding necessary to help us."
Others
share his concerns. Manyang Reath
Kher became a Lost Boy at
age 3 and later founded the charity Humanity
Helping Sudan. He says, "I don't want to sound horrible to those kids
[in the cave], but the attention they got, it should be spread around. Give
that to other children, too."
The
aid community is grappling with that issue as well. While they all stress that
they were deeply moved by the story of the boys in Thailand, they raise a
point: Can the world bring the same level of care and resources to other
children living in crisis? More than half a million Rohingya
children live in camps in Bangladesh, for example, and 800 children die of
malaria each day.
There
are, of course, reasons why the cave story is so riveting.
No comments:
Post a Comment