It is not to minimize the horror of the Boston bombings -- indeed, it is to highlight it -- that I point to the difference between media coverage of Boston and that of the West, Texas explosion. The former was roughly 24/7 on the big cable channels, with some coverage of the Texas explosion. But then when you look to the road fatalities stats, you realize there's something amazing when 30,000 deaths a year doesn't gain any national news at all. So what's going on? Some observations below.
1a. It increases the horror of Boston to know that the victims weren't chosen. They had a kind of bad luck, but the cause of the death was deliberate, not accidental. So they were victims of "random murder." When this is called "terrorism," it is ripe for political exploitation.
2a. The victims of Boston were of the right type -- middle class spectators of an athletic event -- as opposed to the multiple everyday murder victims who never make the national news. Why not? Well, for one thing, some of the victims can be dismissed as gang bangers. Secondly, there's just nothing new any more about an everday dispute, domestic or neighborhood, that escalates to murder.
3. To return to the Texas explosion, of course there are factors that influence the probability of accidents; the explosion was an event that crystallized a network of multi-scale factors. But the complexities of multiple and dispersed decisions concerning zoning, right-to-work, and regulatory capture / weakening made over decades that increased the probability -- and bad effects -- of the Texas explosion doesn't fit a simple narrative, nor does it have the affective charge of random murder. So there's an effect of normalization here, such that shoulders are shrugged and we mutter "industrial accidents happen."
3a. We also can't overlook the geography of wealth factors here. Poor folks live next to fertilizer plants in West, Texas but middle-class folk go watch the finish of the Boston Marathon. So there's class identification at work here, both in the news producers of the cable networks, and in their target viewerships.
4. About roadway deaths, it's good to see the declining annual rates, from 42,000 in 2001 to 32,000 in 2011. But they would be much lower still with increasing public transport. But the factors that increased individual vehicle use in the post-WWII era (suburbanization, highway building, under-funding of public transport, the marketing of car and motorcycle use as an exercise of freedom, and so on) are so deep and dispersed that they would require more work than even the complex narratives needed for the Texas explosion.
4a. There's also a feeling of control with driving. I seem to remember reading (and I hope someone can point to studies) that one of the factors behind the under-estimation of risk in car use and the over-estimation of risk in commercial air travel is the feeling of control of drivers makes them feel better even though they are objectively at much more risk when driving than when flying.
5. Finally, to bring this to a close, reminding folks of the normalized risk of driving is a downer, whereas TV news is all about a narrative of triumph and overcoming, which we see with the Boston coverage: a) the triumph of the police capture of the suspect, and b) the "triumph of the human spirit" angle in the stories of the helpers at the scene and the collective mourning and defiance of Bostonians ("Boston strong," "Boston will run again.")
5a. This "triumph of the human spirit" angle, I want to emphasize, is not manufactured so much as it is appropriated, amplified, focused, and narrativized by the media and exploited by politicians. That such political affect was mobilized more in Boston than for Texas and not at all for the roadways is what I wanted to try to talk about.
5b. What would our society look like if the default prosociality that allows us to be "our own first responders" in disasters was used as the basis for social organization, rather than derided as an "atavism"?
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