One of the many things that I have struggled with here culturally is the diaster porn that is the Cambodian excuse for the media. TV & printed journalism frequently will show the mangled bodies of RTA victims laying dead on the tarmac or patients supine on dirty hospital trolleys covered in their own blood, in obvious pain. They reported with relish the story of a man that raped & murdered his stepdaughter & then beheaded his wife, who himself was then beaten to death by a angry mob of 50 villagers. They have no reservations about showing the slain bodies of murder or the victims of rape. As an emergency doctor it is not as if I haven't seen my fair share of major trauma & death, I just get perturbed when it is shared publicly without anyone here even batting an eyelid.
On Facebook people create their own disaster porn from moto drivers with heads literally split open after colliding with Capitol buses to dead babies hanging out the windows of crushed shared taxis, taken on their smart phones & shared on social networks. This psychosclerosis or hardening of their attitudes towards graphic scenes of violence is symptomatic of a much darker psychological stain this country bears. But what concerns me is the total lack of respect this shows towards the victims & their families, the absence of confidentiality when the subject is actually a patient in a health care facility as well as the distraction & shift of focus from potentially more news worthy stories this results in.
And as is so often the case when I start to explore something deeper that relates to Cambodia, I then inevitably find certain parallels with my home country. The recent BBC coverage of Typhoon Haiyan had rather too many shots of distressed, orphaned children for my liking as well as among the ariel shots of the utter devastation of flattened buildings a cynically edited shot of two UN staff stood with their hands on their hips apparently doing nothing, before cutting back to a person being pulled out from under a tree. Maybe I have grown over sensitive to reporting bias & a state controlled media, perhaps there is no such thing as balanced reporting any more anyway.
Last week whilst on the Thai border we were walking with the hospital director to see the new equipment for theatre when we came across a crowd outside the surgical ward. In the centre was a 7 year old boy looking scared & upset with an enormous bandage on his head. Two men with cameras were taking photos of him.
It was explained to me that the boys parents were killed in a moto accident & he was now orphaned. Why are they taking photos of him? I asked, the boy was starting to look even more distressed as the large throng of strangers - patients & their relatives - crowded around to see what was happening.
They are journalists from the press - I was informed.
What about confidentiality or consent? I asked bemused.
A silent shrug....this is Cambodia - they can do as they please.
They started taking photos of me & my english work colleague at which point we both began to feel rather imposed upon. We imagined the headline - NGO Barangs in white 4x4 plough down & orphan Khmer child yet do nothing to help him.
After we tried to explain our western perspective to the hospital director, how would he feel if this was his orphaned son? etc. he finally tried to ask the journalists to not photograph us or the boy anymore as we didn't like it. They just stood there & lit up a cigarette.....which leads me very nicely onto my second Cambodian media story.
Just before I arrived my base hospital introduced a smoking ban. A Khmer nurse advisor from another NGO - Rt - was walking to conduct some student nurse training when he spotted two men smoking by the surgical ward. Rt went over to explain to them that this was a clinical area & was hence non-smoking. He got a tirade of verbal abuse along the lines of 'who the hell do you think you are? Do you know who you are speaking to? How dare you! Rt went on his way to his training session & thought nothing of one of the men taking his photo. Rt was only informing them of hospital policy & couldn't see what harm he had done.
The next day there was a half page spread in a national newspaper with a photo of Rt - identifying him as a cruel & terrible nurse who neglected patients to instead harass & abuse innocent bystanders.
This story may go some way to explaining why J & I were so camera shy last week - we knew enough about Cambodian 'journalism' to avoid getting on the wrong side of the camera lens.
No photos please, we're British!
On Facebook people create their own disaster porn from moto drivers with heads literally split open after colliding with Capitol buses to dead babies hanging out the windows of crushed shared taxis, taken on their smart phones & shared on social networks. This psychosclerosis or hardening of their attitudes towards graphic scenes of violence is symptomatic of a much darker psychological stain this country bears. But what concerns me is the total lack of respect this shows towards the victims & their families, the absence of confidentiality when the subject is actually a patient in a health care facility as well as the distraction & shift of focus from potentially more news worthy stories this results in.
And as is so often the case when I start to explore something deeper that relates to Cambodia, I then inevitably find certain parallels with my home country. The recent BBC coverage of Typhoon Haiyan had rather too many shots of distressed, orphaned children for my liking as well as among the ariel shots of the utter devastation of flattened buildings a cynically edited shot of two UN staff stood with their hands on their hips apparently doing nothing, before cutting back to a person being pulled out from under a tree. Maybe I have grown over sensitive to reporting bias & a state controlled media, perhaps there is no such thing as balanced reporting any more anyway.
Last week whilst on the Thai border we were walking with the hospital director to see the new equipment for theatre when we came across a crowd outside the surgical ward. In the centre was a 7 year old boy looking scared & upset with an enormous bandage on his head. Two men with cameras were taking photos of him.
It was explained to me that the boys parents were killed in a moto accident & he was now orphaned. Why are they taking photos of him? I asked, the boy was starting to look even more distressed as the large throng of strangers - patients & their relatives - crowded around to see what was happening.
They are journalists from the press - I was informed.
What about confidentiality or consent? I asked bemused.
A silent shrug....this is Cambodia - they can do as they please.
They started taking photos of me & my english work colleague at which point we both began to feel rather imposed upon. We imagined the headline - NGO Barangs in white 4x4 plough down & orphan Khmer child yet do nothing to help him.
After we tried to explain our western perspective to the hospital director, how would he feel if this was his orphaned son? etc. he finally tried to ask the journalists to not photograph us or the boy anymore as we didn't like it. They just stood there & lit up a cigarette.....which leads me very nicely onto my second Cambodian media story.
Just before I arrived my base hospital introduced a smoking ban. A Khmer nurse advisor from another NGO - Rt - was walking to conduct some student nurse training when he spotted two men smoking by the surgical ward. Rt went over to explain to them that this was a clinical area & was hence non-smoking. He got a tirade of verbal abuse along the lines of 'who the hell do you think you are? Do you know who you are speaking to? How dare you! Rt went on his way to his training session & thought nothing of one of the men taking his photo. Rt was only informing them of hospital policy & couldn't see what harm he had done.
The next day there was a half page spread in a national newspaper with a photo of Rt - identifying him as a cruel & terrible nurse who neglected patients to instead harass & abuse innocent bystanders.
This story may go some way to explaining why J & I were so camera shy last week - we knew enough about Cambodian 'journalism' to avoid getting on the wrong side of the camera lens.
No photos please, we're British!
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