My catastrophe is bigger than yours

The grief of those bereaved following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, their attempts to somehow get on with their lives, to salvage something from the swamped wreckage, just didn’t strike the right chord for some Western spectators. They wanted more. More devastation, more disaster - more titillation. And what better way to sate their pangloomian desires than a potential nuclear holocaust? If accusing parts of the media, campaign groups and politicians of uranium-fuelled sadism seems a little harsh, the UK coverage alone provides more than enough evidence for the prosecution. No sooner had the tsunami inundated vast swathes of Japan than the headlines were excitedly imagining the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. ‘Fears of catastrophe as nuclear plant explodes’, chirruped The Sunday Times as news emerged that the Fukushima nuclear power plant had been damaged. Elsewhere, the Observer heard ‘an echo of Chernobyl’. As the week progressed, the End of Days approached. The Sun seemed to be promoting a series of 1970s-style disaster movies on its front page, complete with full-page radiation-warning mock-ups. By Tuesday, the editors had settled for a handy biblical hook for their coverage: ‘Apocalypse Japan.’ On the same day, the Daily Mail ran with a simple headline ‘MELTDOWN’. Given that there has yet to be a meltdown, the subheading was on hand to lend a bit of clarity: ‘Catastrophe fears grow as Japan races against time.’ While Japan may have been ‘racing against time’, the Daily Mail under the heading ‘Nature’s Deadly Rage’ was taking a more passive approach in a piece called: ‘Countdown to nuclear catastrophe.’ And count down the live media did. Live updates were available online, broadcasters showed endless live footage from the Fukushima reactors, and commentators sat around in London studios endlessly, groundlessly speculating about the extent to which ‘the Japanese had lost control of the situation’. Even the BBC’s flagship ‘serious’ news programme Newsnight was positively heady with catastrophe. There correspondent Matt Frei stood, in Tokyo, waxing ominous about ‘nature’s fury’ and warning nonsensically of ‘the whims of fusion’. Someone at the BBC really should have told Matt that nuclear power generation currently involves splitting atoms, not joining them. Still, while he couldn’t tell his fusion from his fission, he knew what he liked, and that was a looming terminus, the prospect of something so terrible, something so devastating, that the ‘most technologically advanced country on the planet’ was about to be humbled. It didn’t matter that those people actually living in Japan seemed far less terrified by events than those watching them from afar (as Sophie Knight describes on spiked today). It didn’t matter that, as one reporter in Fukushima reported, the town nearest the nuclear power plant had virtually returned to normal. And it didn’t matter that virtually every scientific expert, normally so reliable when it comes to bigging up bad news, said there was little to worry about. The Western media was so transfixed by a catastrophe to come that reality came a poor second to nightmare.

Read the rest at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10325/