U.S. media’s lack of focus on Hurricane Sandy’s fatalities highlight stark cultural divide
In Israel, front pages would be taken over by photos and bios of those who lost their lives.
It has been surprisingly difficult to find the pictures and the life stories of the close to 100 people who were killed by Hurricane Sandy. With an occasional exception here and there, most the front pages of the newspapers in the Tri-State area, as well as the television and radio news bulletins, have been devoted in recent days to the destruction, to the hardships, to the economic impact. The dead have been relegated to the inside pages, if at all.
If a calamity of similar proportions had hit Tel Aviv, the front pages of all the Israeli newspapers would be nearly identical. There might be a big headline at the top or bottom of the page about the event itself, but most of the page would be taken up by rows and rows of tiny, thumbnail photos of the people who had been killed in the disaster. And most of the newspaper itself would be devoted to their life stories – each and every last one of them.
There is a long-standing standard operating procedure in Israeli news organizations for such events. The first thing news editors do when they hear of any incident in which more than three people have been killed is to send out reporters to the victims’ homes to talk to their families, sometimes only minutes after the relatives have been notified of the tragedy, and in particularly unfortunate instances, a few minutes before. The most important task of the journalists who are unlucky enough to get chosen for this task is to obtain a passport photo that can be placed on the front page of the newspaper. Then, if time allows, they are ordered to record a short biography of the deceased victim that will be placed inside the newspaper, with a separate article for each and every one, along with photos from important milestones in his life. These will take up most of the coverage of the tragedy, overriding any other aspect of the story.
I am not judging here. Israel is a small, closed-knit country in which there is a good chance that a significant number of readers will either personally know some of the victims and if not, will know someone else who does. The US is 400 times bigger than Israel in area and has 50 times as many people. The sense of loss in the US is personal, perhaps regional, but rarely national. In the US, grief is a private matter; in Israel, it is communal.
Of course, that’s only part of the story. Religion, culture and history play an obvious role in forging attitudes towards victims of attacks, catastrophes and disasters: Israel’s, in any case, has been steadily evolving in recent decades. I can still remember the front pages of Israeli newspapers in the War of Attrition following the Six Day War, in which the deaths of Israeli soldiers at the Suez Canal, one or even many, not only didn’t dominate the front pages, but in some cases, didn’t even merit the lead headline.
The change started after the Yom Kippur War, the first in which Israelis questioned whether the deaths of so many young Israelis were justified, but the real turning point came in the first Lebanon War. The sharp political disagreements over that engagement turned each IDF fatality into a cause celebre for opponents of the war. Each soldier who died, in battle or otherwise, was accorded a separate headline, a gut-wrenching report of a life ended before its prime, an editorial questioning why and whether it was worth it.
Since then, there has been a steady progression. From military fatalities the enhanced focus turned to victims of terror attacks, as more and more innocent Israelis were killed by Palestinian suicide bombers; from there the preoccupation with the dead, which some call an obsession, spread to those killed in natural and unnatural disasters, especially ones involving Israelis abroad, and finally to routine traffic accidents and victims of crime.
In the process, the natural order of things has been inverted. The deaths of soldiers, those whose duty it is to put their lives on the line in order to protect the country, has become so intolerable for Israeli public opinion that it has come to play a direct and dramatic role in shaping Israeli strategy and policies. The unilateral 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon, the overwhelming firepower used by Israel in the 2009 Cast Lead operation in Gaza, the heavy price Israel has repeatedly paid for the release of Israeli soldiers held hostage – up to and including the 1027 Palestinian prisoners released in exchange for Gilad Shalit – all were a direct outgrowth of Israel’s ever-increasing inability to tolerate loss of life.
Indeed, the disparity between the two countries is most noticeable in the amount of attention, or lack thereof, that the US media devotes to individual American soldiers killed abroad, either in action or in arena-related accidents. This week, the Defense Department announced the deaths in Afghanistan of Alex Domion, 21, of Richfield Springs, NY, Staff Sergeant Kashif Memon, 31, of Houston, Texas and Clinton Ruiz, 22, of Murrieta, California. If you look hard enough on Google News you may find their deaths mentioned by less than 20 news outlets, and not very prominently at that.
Some Israelis believe that the elevation of the “sanctity of life” to an overriding national value is a sign of strength that increases cohesiveness and solidarity and morale. Others view it as a manifestation of weakness, even decadence, an emotional vulnerability that corrodes Israel’s resolve and its ability to ruthlessly pursue its national interest. It is a factor, and not a negligible one at that, in any government decision-making, including the current deliberations on the pros and cons of an attack on Iran. And there are those who will point out, not completely unjustifiably, that Israel’s great concern for its own dead is more than matched by its complete indifference to the lives of others, especially its Palestinian neighbors.
It is, for better or worse, a national characteristic, an ingrained part of the Israeli psyche that can be dissected, explained or argued, but cannot be wished away. Israelis need to see the faces of victims, to read their life stories and to mumble words of sorrow and consolation, even to themselves. It is their way of coping with tragedy, man-made or natural. It is why their eyes first gravitate naturally to look for the small photos of the dead, even in a far-way calamity such as the one that has befallen New York, New Jersey and Connecticut this week.
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WarSclerotic 
November 5, 2012 at 4:36 AM
It’s not a “cultural divide.” It’s the leftist media doing EVERYTHING it can to cover for Obama and his incompetent administration. If you really want to see a ‘divide’ just compare media coverage of Sandy to the coverage the media gave Katrina while G.W. Bush was in office.
The ‘mainstream media’ is now the socialist state media. It may as well be ‘Granma’ of Cuba or the ‘Pravda’ of the USSR.
November 5, 2012 at 8:35 AM
Actually it’s worse than in the USSR.
While in the USSR everybody knew that Prawda and all other news papers were lying, the ‘mainstream media’ in the US do pretend to be objective to some extend and to be comitted to the truth and there are too many people who are deceived by them.
November 5, 2012 at 12:41 PM
The U.S. mass-media are owned by Wall Street.
Their role is to support Wall Street’s interests.
Obama is owned by Wall Street, just like most politicians in the USA.
Romney is a part of Wall Street.
Wall Street is the U.S. capitalist oligarchy.
In the USSR, an oligarchy was in power, too.
Capitalism and socialism are two sides of the same coin. They are both ruled by an oligarchy…that takes advantage of the people. Both oligarchies hold the knife that cuts the cake called GNP, a knife also used to frighten those who disagree with their rule. The real difference between both oligarchies is that capitalist television allows capitalist oligarchies to rule much more easily.
November 7, 2012 at 11:06 AM
Please take a moment to read my memorial to those killed by Hurricane Sandy. http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2012/11/05/the-people-who-were-killed-by-hurricane-sandy/