Cognitive Dissonance

Conan O’Brien stands in a suit and tie clasping his hands and smiling as he jokes, and inches away, a person lies on a stretcher, injured and possibly dead from the earthquake in Haiti, surrounded by onlookers.

That’s the upper half of the front page in The New York Times on Wednesday, January 13, 2010.

In the two left-hand columns (traditionally the “second lead” spot, but twice as wide as usual) and running almost the length of the top half of the page, The Times ran the story of NBC’s treatment of Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno, “the battle of the late night titans.” To the right, under a three-column headline (major lead story), The Times covered the catastrophic earthquake.

A three-to-two ratio.

The picture of devastated people in Haiti was a lot bigger than the picture of the smiling Conan O’Brien, and Haiti was covered more extensively in the rest of the paper, and for the rest of the week, but still, really, come on—the fact is The Times initially devoted almost as much of its front page to the story of late night talk show hosts—two rich white guys fighting with their employers over contracts and schedules—as it did to the destruction of one of the poorest (and blackest) countries in the world by a natural disaster.

Maybe The Times editors were just as stumped and stunned by the news in Haiti as many others, and it took them awhile to see what they were seeing and to grasp the story. Over the rest of the week, the coverage shifted, giving much more attention to Haiti. By Sunday, the major lead was still Haiti—“Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises”—with a 4-column photo of a boy fleeing gunshots, and underneath it, with no photo, a 2-column story on NBC’s woes: “NBC’s Slide From TV’s Heights to Troubled Nightly Punch Line.”

Nevertheless, The Times reported on Saturday that much fewer people watched a TV special on Haiti than watched regularly scheduled TV show dramas like Bones. It also reports that eleven networks are planning a 24-hour marathon of Haiti coverage, instead of regular programming.

The point is not the coverage of Haiti, which is growing so extensive by the minute that in no time, it will turn us all off, but the juxtaposition of these images—so jarring and yet such a mirror of our world: Great privilege, ease, and business-as-usual side-by-side with great poverty and uncontrollable destruction. One is a world where we make choices and have options and have at least a semblance of control; the other is a world where things happen beyond our sense of control, where options seem limited or non-existent, and where there is only a scramble for survival. Taken together, side by side as they are in Wednesday’s Times, these stories provide a perfect picture of our culture’s state of consciousness—both our obliviousness and our caring, our ignorance and our knowledge, our shallowness and our depth, our sense of privilege and our sense of helplessness, our sense of entitlement and our sense of outrage, our determination to succeed and our determination to help those who are suffering.

About the coverage itself, we can explain it easily enough: we are distracting ourselves with entertainment stories; the media is pandering to the public (not only in entertainment coverage but also in its coverage of Haiti); and the media treats the problems of rich white men as so important and of poor people of color as so unimportant that even in the face of major disaster it still treats them almost equally. It’s easy to see how our habits of compartmentalization (entertainment-hard news, us-them, here-there, black-white, me-not me, the real and the unreal) make this type of coverage possible. Maybe we’re so used to such juxtapositions, we don’t even notice them, except in those rare moments such as this one, where they are extremely insensitive.

The O’Brien-Leno story is the type of story we can talk and think about without scratching the surface of life in any way whatsoever—a perfect vehicle for mind (or mindless) chatter. There’s nothing to really feel here, and we have the option of thinking and caring about it or not as we see fit. What happened in Haiti, though, is not something to think about, talk about—it’s requires us to FEEL and to DO something. We have no option but to address it in some deep way, and it hurts—a lot—to even witness what’s happening from afar, and the doing is complicated and messy and brings to the fore all the limits of the world we’ve created so far. That’s one reason people would rather watch their regular shows or follow the ups and downs of talk-show hosts. Still, even if we ignore the story, we know we’re ignoring it, and we feel our ignorance. Over time, media coverage of Haiti will probably turn it into a story that we can’t feel anymore, if we’re far enough removed from the land and the people, but even that loss of caring will at least nudge our consciences.

The earthquake in Haiti broke through the Hollywood-New York Times-life-as-usual-for-any-of-us bubble of unreality, like Katrina, 9-11, and other disasters. Would it were possible for us to wake up without such bloodshed and destruction. May we remain compassionate and alive to what matters most in life.

Bless all of the people who are in Haiti, all who are doing what they can, all who have left this world, and those who remain in it. May our eyes, minds, and hearts be open, and may we find balance.

Happy New Year!

One man says to another man on the subway, “I think 2010 is going to be a good year,” and the other guy nods yes, “The thing about 2010 is going to be knowing which of all the opportunities out there will pay off.”

May sound banal, even clichéd, but when I heard it, I thought, “Yes, that is what it’s going to be about—making decisions and choices and knowing, not just going along, making hunches, but actually knowing.”

That was on January 2, 2010 (Number 1 train going south from 72nd Street, approaching Times Square, middle of the day), and so far it’s true to my experience.

May we all know which of our opportunities will pay off and enjoy this new year--Welcome 2010!