When the news doesn’t inform
Lately, there’s been an enormous amount of news coverage about a guy named James Kim. He was driving home with his family and got stuck in deep snow on a remote mountain road. They waited for help in the car, but when no one found them after a few days, James went out looking for help dressed only in a jacket and tennis shoes. His family was rescued shortly afterwards, but he got lost and died of hypothermia.
I think reporting personal tragedies in the media is generally in poor taste. My general position is that news outlets should not profit off peoples’ misery or pander to voyeurism. Pointing a camera in someone’s face when they are in despair does both of these things.
However, there’s more to it than that. It occurred to me that when Brezhnev died, there was a surprising outpouring of grief in the Soviet Union. It’s easy to dismiss the coverage as communist propaganda, but having talked to people who where there, I think the sentiment was real.
The funny thing is that Brezhnev was not well loved. He was unremarkable as a leader and as an individual. Yet people who had never met him and didn’t even like him were crying. Since the vast majority of people who were upset to learn of James’ fate never knew him, I’m thinking a similar dynamic must be in play now.
I can only come up with two explanations for this strange behavior. The first is that humans are empathetic creatures. That’s why people become deliriously happy after seeing an athlete or musician overcome with emotion after delivering the performance of a lifetime, and why people fall to pieces after seeing someone grieving at a funeral. Feelings are contagious.
Empathy alone can’t explain the whole story. For one thing, it doesn’t explain why people get weepy at sad movies. Why should people get upset about something that didn’t even really happen to an actor pretending to be someone who doesn’t exist?
Which gets me to the second reason. I think that even when a stranger dies, it puts people in touch with how they feel about being deprived of life. In effect, they mourn their own mortality. Likewise, for other sad or happy events, people naturally reflect on how that same event would affect them. Whatever the case, I feel bad for James and the Kim family.