Moving right along
February 3, 2010emily No Comments »Does it strike anyone else as strange that Haiti isn’t really in the news lately? A massive natural disaster strikes the area, killing hundreds of thousands of people, leaving countless numbers homeless and in desperate need of assistance. And it captures our attention for, what, a week? Two weeks, tops? And now it seems as if we’ve dusted our hands off, said, “well, that’s that,” and turned our attention elsewhere. To the special Massachusetts election, the State of the Union, the Oscar nods, and even the premiere of Lost. The front page of the Washington Post has only one link to a Haiti article, and even it takes an inward look, discussing the Americans accused of abducting Haitian children. The New York Times has a story about food distribution in Haiti, but it’s near the bottom of the page, tellingly under ‘more news’. At top center is a photo of a guy who has had his dog ‘debarked.’ Are our attention spans really so easily diverted? Three weeks after the earthquake, are we really ready to move on? Is it that it’s too onerous to stay focused on one thing for more than a couple weeks? Or is the subject matter somehow too disturbing? I’d love to know how it came to be that our national attention span is so short.
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