As we move into the annual celebration of our country’s Independence Day, I find my thoughts still with the recent week-long news cycle focused on the missing and ultimately lost Titan submersible and passengers.
The coverage of the human tragedy constituted a journalistic investment that unfortunately served little more than the short-term goals of eyeballs and advertising dollars.
Worse yet, it damaged our shared self-worth in clear and troubling ways. Each of these cyclical media spectacles do.
The first blow to that self-worth, and to the American experiment, comes in the form of prolonging the already immeasurable suffering of the victims’ families, friends and neighbors, desperate for answers.
On June 18th, technology, hubris and extravagance merged into fool-hearted risk-taking. Five souls perished in the gears of experimental technology, during perhaps a search for meaning, deep in an alien environment, that earthly wealth could not buy. This narrative was clear and complete less than 24 hours after the submersible’s disappearance.
There was every indication the craft had imploded from the start, from the manner of systems failure, to previous warnings and reports of major design flaws, to sonar detection of the implosion.
Yet the news cycle lasted a full week, ending on a cruel round of coverage about phantom banging noises.
The second blow comes in turning away from the equally—if not more—impactful tragedies unfolding among friends, families, and neighbors who live more ordinary lives.
Among those are:
1.2 million American children missing from U.S. schools, more than 10,600 in Washington state alone.
Teen girls struggling with the lasting and deeply negative impact of social media usage.
Parents and communities working to prevent summer learning loss among children in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These stories rage on in every American city and state, including mine and yours. Yet the media coverage they have received beyond, in only some cases, a brief initial news cycle, has faded to effectively zero.
These were hardly the only failures of our collective radar.
Every community where newsworthy information critical to the safety, security and self-direction of American life fell off the page or broadcast of local media outlets to make room for coverage of the Titan charade, the self-respect we earn and share in attending to the most vulnerable and our collective well-being took a blow.
This violation of public trust invites a moment of collective pause from all of us.
As we celebrate the Fourth of July, I hope we will find that moment. I hope we will search for answers to the challenges we face collectively, and celebrate the nation we want to become: one in which the hope for our communities is not sidelined for spectacle in the service of near-term profits, but attended to by the media and its consumers alike, elevated to be a greater part of our shared experience.
These challenges are not hopeless. The solutions are alive, banging noisily for rescue inside the damaged hull of our shared dignity and democracy, if only we can silence the spectacle long enough to hear and locate them.
