PressEthic

Stalin once said that the death of one person is a tragedy, while the death of a million is only a statistic. While I don’t usually agree with Stalin, I have to agree that there is certain logic to this opinion. When one person dies, the news is filled with details of the person’s life, who they were, and what they did, and who their families are. It’s impossible to do that when there are thousands and tens of thousands of victims. The New York Times did a pretty good job of profiling the victims of 9/11 in their short little bios after the tragedy happened, but it’s not often that media outlets can do that.

It seems like a lot of bad stuff happened this year – the tsunami in South East Asia, Hurricane Katrina and the recent earthquake in Pakistan. We don’t even hear about the frequent earthquakes in Iran anymore. People are tired of hearing about tragedy, especially when it happens across the globe. And when there are so many victims, it seems like the number stop making an impact. There’s no way to assimilate those enormous numbers.

That’s why this article in the New York Times Magazine caught my eye. It’s long – very long. But even if you can’t read the whole thing, read some of it. It’s a beautifully written piece about some of the victims of the tsunami, some of the people who survived it, and some of the people who went to help. Obviously, there was no way the reporter, Barry Bearak, could write about everyone who was affected, but the article really does a good job of putting a few faces on some of those numbers.

It makes a point too – all the other people that he couldn’t write about, they had lives too. They had families, and jobs and homes, and faces and names. They were real. And the least they deserve is an article in the New York Times.