Information from the Mass Media

[sciguy125]

Originally Posted by Beth Sweet

Yes, it stinks that there aren't straight facts out there, but the fact is, it is not a straight news story, it is a human interest piece. Plain and simple. These people need help. The media has the power to get them said help. End of story.

I was going for a more general comment on the media. My feelings don't focus directly on the hurricane situation, this is just what drove me over the edge and got me to voice my opinion somewhere.

Take the war for example. People are complaining about their sons going to Iraq and getting killed. They're soldiers. They signed up to fight and, if called to, risk their lives. If they didn't want that, they shouldn't have joined the military. What bothers me is that the media likes to focus on the people griping about how their families are being torn apart. Or giving airtime to people bickering with each other about what we should be doing. While this does slightly interest me, it doesn't solve anything. I want to know why this is happening. Why did Bush decide that we should go in? Why have so many Americans died in this war?

The most important question you can ever ask is why. Unless you know why a situation is the way it is, you will never truly understand it. Any fixes you apply will only be patches. You need to understand the root of the problem to do something about it. If you hope to prevent it from happening again, you need to know why it happened in the first place.

To go back to the hurricane, why are we in this position? Why are people waiting days for rescue? Why were rescue worker being shot at? If we understand what is going on, we can figure out the best way to handle the situation and how to prevent it from happening again. Could levee upgrades stop this from happening again? Maybe we need to revamp our emergency procedures. Maybe it's the best we can do without going overboard with our paranoia. Should law enforcement go in first to calm things down before rescuers go in?

Listening to Senator X tell me what he wants to happen, or seeing Citizen Y looking for food and water doesn't help me understand what is going on. Being a FIRST forum, let's look at this as an engineering problem. Something has happened and we want to prevent it from happening again. If everybody gets in a big group and starts talking, we won't get anywhere. Everyone needs to take some time to analyze the situation, then discuss how we are going to handle things. If we never get the facts we need, however, we will never get our time to analyze. Instead, we'll be left to use whatever predigested, possibly tainted, possibly selective information that the media decides to feed us.