Call me cynical, but doesn’t it seem like every time a member of the police or armed forces gets killed the NZ media jumps into a frenzy of clichéd and over-the-top reporting? Not content to run a lead story on it, TV 1 tonight had to feature at least 3 live crosses during the news bulletin to various locations around the area in South Auckland where some undercover cop was shot while conducting surveillance on a suspected P-lab.
Then later on Campbell Live the whole sentimental saga was dragged out again. Watching the sorry spectacle I was reminded of the comments made by Middle Eastern Foreign Correspondent Robert Fisk during the talk he gave at last weekend’s Christchurch Writers Festival, when he said that journalism was increasingly being reduced to a stock of clichés – a kind of paint-by-numbers exercise if you will.
Thus police officers like the one in the report linked to above are always “unsung heroes”, killed “in the line of duty”. Our thoughts of course must always “with the families” while those present at the time are left “still in shock”.
Then the inevitable pundits come out to lament the “social breakdown” and propose “tougher sentences” for the “violent thugs roaming our streets”.
Attempts are seldom made to analyse seriously the underlying issues, since the “story”, such as it is, has already been written and either broadcast or published hundreds of times before.
On the other hand, perhaps Baudrillard was right when he said that the simulacrum is the only genuine manifestation of reality and we should just forget about trying to seriously understand the world or (god forbid!) actually change it.
