The Oklahoma Tornado

The images look like they’ve come from the CGI-created scenes of a movie. I’m not sure anyone could have looked at them and not had their hearts in their mouths, not commiserated with the loss and devastation being experienced by the citizens of Oklahoma.

Unfortunately, the tornado’s devastating path has become the set of something else. Once again the media has invaded, looking to exploit the story of the suffering and turn it into good ratings on the nightly news. It’s something that, unfortunately, seems to happen with every tragedy faced by any people in America.

It’s almost surreal to see Brian Williams and Anderson Cooper standing amidst the wreckage of such a disaster. Maybe that’s why their producers send them to be there. But it also seems completely unnecessary. The use of splintered homes and torn up cul-de-sacs as a setting, as a backdrop to the news man’s somber face seems to belittle the trauma endured by the people of Moore, Oklahoma. The focus of the show, be it NBC Nightly News or the hour-long “special” dedicated to covering the tornado, is that the newspeople are there, that they are standing in the rubble and interviewing the survivors. They aren’t covering the news of the day; they’re making themselves a part of it.

One example is Wolf Blitzer’s interview with one Oklahoma mother. Like most interviews with survivors of tragedy, this one seems completely fake. Wolf absent-mindedly strokes the infant’s leg with his thumb. It may appear that he is being caring and compassionate, but he seems to be playing a part. I imagine him thinking that this could be one of those Iconic News Moments. The baby could start crying, then the mother would too. Imagine how many likes the photo of Wolf Blitzer singlehandedly consoling a traumatized infant and an exhausted mother would get on Facebook? Instead he asks her the awkward and unnecessary question of whether she “thanks the lord” for her survival. Maybe he thinks this is a softball question meant to tie up the interview. Ask a Midwesterner about God, and they’ll surely give some passionate, heartfelt and newsworthy response. Except when that Midwesterner is an atheist.

He and the rest of the media aren’t there to be compassionate and helpful and kind. They’re in Oklahoma, standing on broken homes and demolished schools and torn up playgrounds, to make news, to be a part of the news.

Walter Cronkite never did this. He sat behind a desk, and when he was somber and serious in his reporting, he was truly somber and serious. Nobody rushed him out to be a part of some story. He kept his distance because he was a newsman, a reporter. He wasn’t an actor. He got his information and then he presented it to his audience. He wanted to, and he did, keep his distance from the stories, and it’s what made him one of the greatest that the news media has ever seen.

There is a need for field reporters to gather information and facts, but there isn’t any necessity to bring whole shows, camera crews and television hosts to tragedies and have them stomp through the streets of crushed dreams and broken hearts.