Massacres In Africa (And Floods In My Southern Highlands)
(ANALYSIS) Please allow me a moment of grief and frustration. I am, you see, worrying about friends who are missing and, to be blunt, no one knows if some of them will be fatalities in the the great Hurricane Helene catastrophe in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
But this is a Rational Sheep post. This is a story about mass media, screens culture and our lives.
I am poised, this week, to move into a house in the Tri-Cities of Northeast Tennessee in a neighborhood that was flooded at the end of last week. Our house survived, but we have work to do. Can we move our big furniture in this week as scheduled? It certainly is an interesting time to move to a community that dates back to the American Revolution.
What we have here is a painful two-part post — with one truly American story and the other global. But the basic question is the same in both: Why does important news in some locations receive little or no ink (that’s a metaphor) while news of a similar kind gets wall-to-wall coverage in elite media?
The key word there was “location,” as in the old real-estate mantra — “location, location, location.”
There is a Facebook page called the “Burnsville Hub.” Right now, it is one digital doorway — there are many others linked to isolated, wounded communities — into the lives of people stranded up the back roads of the Blue Ridge Mountains (and the Smokies). It is a never-ending stream of posts from people basically saying: “Has anyone been up 197 (insert name of two-late road)? Can I reach my grandparents (insert proper word for friend of loved one) yet? I have not heard from them since Thursday night. My grandfather is on medications that he requires every day. What can I do to find them?”
In many cases the only way into these locations is by helicopter. Young people in ATVs may have a chance to get through. Many people are hiking out to relay news of who is alive, who is safe, who is in danger.
Yes, I love Asheville. I have for decades. But there is more to this story than Asheville and editors and producers in national-level newsrooms have to know that.
Yancey County is not an easy place to get to right now. I don’t think journalists need to try to fly in — but drones would be a great idea or satellite images, even. What journalists need to do is get to the major towns, like Burnsville, and interview the people who are hiking out. Many have digital photos and videos they might be willing to share.
People are in danger.
Some people are dying.
I know that this isn’t Taylor Swift missing her second Kansas City Chiefs game in a row. I know that it isn’t Vice President Kamala Harris doing a photo-op at the border to Mexico.
This is news. Even though it is in a zip code without five-star hotels.
Now, this brings me to the second post — on the same basic subject — that I wrote late last week, since I will be on the road today (headed into the flood zone to check the status of the house into which we are poised to move).
This takes us to isolated villages and towns in Africa. Please let me know about any mistakes of typos. I don’t type very well when my hands are shaking.
To read the rest of this post, please visit Terry Mattingly’s Substack at Rational Sheep.
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.