Blackout

My unease with the media will always be a part of who I am. I will always question the motives of our news bearers and the authority of that news. I am a news junkie, I feed on what is happening in the wider world in an endless search for answer to the what, where, who and why of the strangest species on this earth. I look for these answers several times a day in search of some evidence of our worth and right to keep going. So the media is my addiction and my greatest foe all in one. They are my coffee, my cocaine, my sweet poison and I love and loathe them daily. I am endlessly intrigued by the matters that the media chooses to share and chooses to hide, and how these very decisions change the way we operate as a community with varying degrees of success and failure. I am acutely aware of how powerful the media is and I am even more aware of their awareness of this fact. I dread big news stories in the same way I crave them, as I am often ashamed how the Australian media covers sensitive matters with anything but sensitivity. Sometimes I need to remove myself from the news and walk away, turn off the radio, TV and resist the online news habit. This year I have been doing that more than ever, as this year my home state of Queensland have been served many answers to some very long questions. Schapelle Corby, Daniel Morcombe and Baden-Clay stories are all unravelling before our eyes like a long awaited finale to a long suffering sitcom. This news junkie has hardly read a word about either of these cases. I can’t be swept up in the sensationalist storm the media has created, even if the stories have in some ways formed the foundations of who I am. They matter too much to whom we are as a state, and they matter too much to whom we are as a community, and the media have used that against us. When the news becomes this big it loses some of its power. This is something the media lost sight of after September 11. They have yet to realise that their way of delivering/making news has ripped the readers away from the very thing they are trying to sell us. Turning everyday people’s pain into Hollywood style blockbusters has robbed the story of its humanity, its rawness, its reality. The media feeds on macabre while the community mourn their ability to know how to react, recover and respect. I have a family that has attracted some media attention and I have seen it being turned in a farcical mix of half truths and whole lies. My whole body aches when I see a grieving person shoved in front of a camera, when I see pain all over the screen splashed with insensitivity, when I see questions unanswered yet still flaunted all over the media in the most public of ways. I cannot watch the eyes of the Morcombe’s that still hold that ten year look of terror or the dulled, deadened eyes of Schapelle that have leaked a whole life of possibilities and potential behind bars. I cannot watch people consume this private pain or the people that believe it is their god given right to exploit it. I turned away not out of disinterest as they are often in my thoughts, but I chose not to consume out of respect for the story that has changed them forever because stories like that can never truly be told. I dread break throughs in the cold case of my family as to be honest, closure has become secondary to privacy and preservation. As a community we need to really talk about how far we are willing to go to seek the media’s version of truth. We need to step back and decide once and for all what is allowed to be considered news and when it is simply an invasion of our decency and grief.