Disaster fatigue?

Anderson Cooper, the blue-eyed face of CNN News, is at it again. In this edition, Mr. Cooper and his team are charging down to New Orleans to cover the inevitable wreckage Hurricane Gustav will wreak in the enfeebled New Orleans area. Will it be gripping coverage? Most certainly. Emotionally affecting and dramatic? Without a doubt. Just look at this short blog from one of AC's producers: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/31/lights-out-suddenly-it-seems-real/. Its bone-chilling in its poignancy and immediacy...and another example of how much the media has evolved these past few generations. With the advent of cable news, the American public can witness these events closer than ever before.

But are we over-saturated with this coverage? Does the fact that every channel we click on or every radio station we tune into offer "coverage you can't get anywhere else" make this event less momentous?

I'm afraid it does. What we are experiencing today is a bit analogous to Stalin's quip "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." The American public simply wearies of these repeated stories, broadcast in all vast reaches of media. Interestingly, the closer and closer we get to the tragedy, repeatedly, the more common it seems to be. Not to sound insensitive, but what seperates this catatrostophe from the Chinese earthquake of a few months ago or Katrina a few years ago? From a media standpoint, it's essentially the same-- eyewitness accounts on ground zero, the talking heads back in New York decrying the circumstances that enabled this to happen and trumpeting this as THE worst thing to hit mankind.

I read Mr. Cooper's book, "Disptaches from the Edge," immediately when it hit bookshelves. I was haunted by the accounts of post-tsunami Sri Launka and tragic death in Africa. Appropriately subtitled "A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival," in it Mr. Cooper masterfully illustrated his experiences during those sexy accounts of news coverage, what we're now witnessing here. I was shaken and moved.

Now? It sits on bookshelf, dusty and untouched since I finished it within a week. Yep, the stories sure were arresting ... it's a shame I'm now so desensitized I now look back on my reaction as naive.