Flat Screen Messages
The flat screen at the front of the bus seemed to demand our attention. It normally carried advertisements or the rather dull news programmes that one easily ignored. Today however, it broadcast live picture from the earthquake zone. The media are all covering the story as it happens, with unrestrained access for both domestic and foreign journalists. To those used to blanket coverage of disasters, the style, and sentimentality even, of the reporting may seem rather clichéd, but for domestic viewers to have such unrestricted access to the chaos of a horrible reality as it unfolds, is new and very different. Even on a hot and sticky Beijing bus we were riveted.
In other disasters, one felt manipulated only, with carefully staged pictures of the People’s Liberation Army doing deeds of daring do for a grateful public. We were allowed to see only complete success, under the leadership of the Communist Party; while in reality, responses were often patchy. Now we are dealing with a new situation, one in which blogs have made us all into reporters and mobile phones have turned even the most humble farmer into a potential CNN camera man. The uninhibited nature of the media coverage has been quite staggering. The images of unfolding horror are everywhere; in ones living room, on the huge screens on certain street corners and even on the flat screen hoarding on Beijing’s buses. The new candour, one which even allows state leaders to say that initial objectives had not been met, has proven very effective in binding the people together behind the government. If this is only a revised form of the old manipulation of public opinion one saw in the past, I take my hat off to the mandarins who put it together, it is quite brilliant.
All the TV stations have montages of images from the earthquake aired to sentimental music. They are rather predictable, mangled bodies being pulled from crumpled schools, valiant nurses tending wounded victims, soldiers doing their inevitable daring do (but now no longer the only heroes) and crying children being comforted by visiting dignitaries. All a bit cheesy for my taste, but they work. Riding the bus yesterday, I was glued to the flat screen, and became quite tearful as image piled upon image. Perhaps watching the flashing pictures we were being manipulated by an authoritarian government, but it did not feel that way. Instead we were being allowed to see the full horror of the disaster, and the range of the response. That, in itself, rebounded to the government’s credit, because it seems to be doing an excellent job in managing a human disaster on a dreadful scale.
It was images from those montages that stay in my mind during the “ordinary” work days that have been anything but ordinary since that Monday when the earth shook. I am discovering that even far from the flattened towns, organising a response is difficult work. In this heady atmosphere, everybody seems to develop a messiah complex, egos need stroking and hastily developed responses show the weak points in management structures. My work is at this, the blunt end of the response process. Not very dashing perhaps, but not without its importance. One feels somehow part of something much bigger than oneself right now. The cheesy montages maybe to blame, but one gets a sense that we are all “doing our bit” of a worthy cause. It is good to be here right now, even tearful on a bus in an already sweltering Beijing.