Hey guys 🙂
Welcome back! This term my ASTU class starts with another political comic book Safe Area Gorazde (following the Persepolis) accomplished by a U.S. journalist, Joe Sacco. With the narrative, mainly the story related to Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, inserted into the drawing, the book acts as a recount of local people’s terrible experiences during the wartime. As cruel as it can be, the war, in my perspective, shows us more than what could be perceived from the surface. For instance, the role of media, especially “foreign media” which looks like a “passer-by” of issues as well as events, should also be taken into consideration, and Joe actually pictured the relatively dark side of the phenomenon in his book, too.
On page 130, Joe drew some journalists who “blew in” in Gorazde in the morning but “blew out” with the U.N. convoy in the afternoon after taking some shots and short interviews there. Particularly, in order to get what they wanted in an instant, photographers threw candy which named as bon-bon at kids and “captured predictable mad scramble”. When I read here, I was really shocked and uncomfortable. The original emergence of media, I believe, symbolized people’s urgency to the REAL FACT, because a number of issues, as well as events, started to blur within the chaos made by the rapid development of the world. In this case, journalists and photographers ought to doubtlessly act as the defender of reality and purity. However, in Joe’s book, these “defenders” didn’t realize their responsibility but treat their interviews there as terrible tasks to be done. What could we expect from the interview, which may illustrate disastrous events, just accomplished in few hours? What could we get from the photographs where children are scrambling for candy thrown by the photographer? How could we trust the big picture in front of us? What’s the story behind fake story shown to us? It’s pretty hard to answer these cruel but sad questions, and it can be more dreadful if a lot of innocent people are deceived by the media.
Again, on page 217, a group of Spanish TV crew requested Riki to lead them around and told them the war in Gorazde before they left in the afternoon. In response, Riki pointed to some damaged buildings and said: “Look!”, which meant that the story these journalists sought for, was just around them. As I mentioned above, the TV crew saw their interviews as workload rather than a responsibility, and here is much more obvious when one of them begged Riki: “please help us”. In class, my classmate Nic mentioned that it looked like an irony that people from real safe areas asked survivors of the disastrous war to help them. Think about it, isn’t these journalists job to help and save people in Gorazde by doing real interviews about there? What’s more, there are almost no intact buildings around the crew; however, paradoxically, the damages seemed transparent and invisible to them at that moment. Then, what’s the consequence of phenomena like these? Yes, most of us, more or less, are fooled by what we could see in newspapers, journals or TV channels.
On the other hand, does it mean that we could trust nothing shown on media? Probably not, but to be honest, I’m not sure. A few days before, an Iraqi journalist was released from a kidnapping, and BBC commented that: “ Iraq is considered one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist”. I am deeply touched because no matter how hard it is, some people still choose to do what they think is right. To some extent, there seems a huge gap between Iraqi journalists and journalists from western countries; in other words, the severe pain just can not be felt by the passer-by.
Briefly, as a global citizen today, it’s my duty to be sensitive to the surroundings and the “worlds” far away from me, and I’m convinced that some of our media, those fake defenders, could not disguise themselves forever as long as we people do what we should do: appreciate but may not accept the entire picture in front of us completely.
Thanks for reading 🙂
Bibliography
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-38510102
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