Thursday, November 10, 2011

Reaction to Media Coverage of Penn State Scandal

I'm kind of ashamed of the way we, as a society, are responding to this Penn State tragedy. I'm not talking on an individual level although I have to say I've heard some surprising individual comments about it. However, most people aren't mentioning it at all and if you didn't have cable you might not even know that this happened.

I do have to say, however, that when I did start googling all of the news coverage of this tragedy...I was disgusted. Not just by what happened, which is enough to make your head, heart and internal organs explode from the feelings of sadness/injustice/anger/disgust (pick one or all) but from the way the media is covering it. All they are showing in these initial days of coverage are pictures of Joe Paterno.

This is about those boys that were abused, not Penn State or even Joe Paterno. Those boys deserve better from us and definitely from the media. As to the people who are already making jokes or saying that they've heard enough about it, I wish they would have a little more empathy about those children and how they would feel if this happened to them or someone in their own family...

I remember hearing somewhere that the reason that we turn away from others pain is that we are programmed to turn away from our own. To be embarrassed by it, see it as a sign of weakness. Maybe we don't want to see the truth sometimes, but it's still there. And when we don't face it, people get hurt.

No comments:

Post a Comment