The impact of Hurricane Sandy has thrown up more
than just chaos in America. While houses are being ripped up, Wall Street shut
down, power outages and lives lost something far more important seems to have
gripped the minds of a rather substantial amount of news agencies and bloggers,
the cause of the storm.
While it may come as a surprise to many people it
would appear that Hurricane Sandy is not, as may have been foolishly thought, a natural meteorological event.
Instead it is in fact anything from the wrath of a vengeful god, a callous
campaign stunt from President Obama or alien intervention.
For the most part we are all aware of the rants
which some conspiracy theorists come out and have become inculcated against. As
such it is reasonably safe to assume that the views of Pastor John McTernan,
who argued that the storm was a punishment from a divine being for America
allowing homosexual marriage, or that the storm itself was foretold by little
green men from a galaxy far far away (and not as suspected at Disney studios) would
be dismissed as ever so much rot.
When the conspiracy ideas start to form in relation
to President Obama or the American elections the sheer weight of people jumping
on the bandwagon has to make people start to wonder about the sanity of those
people allowed to report on the news.
Articles accusing Obama of orchestrating the storm
via a genuine scientific experiment the High Frequency Active Auroral Research
Programme (HAARP) caught the attention of people shortly before certain rather
right wing republican news organisations started to accuse the President’s
administration of using the storm to hide bad news, cover up employment
figures, postpone the election or in one case create some form of dictatorship.
When the religious and political right start to use
a natural event to help them spout ideas of a vengeful god, intolerance and bigotry,
hatred and just plain stupidity, then the news and those who write and
broadcast it must step back and question where it has all gone wrong.
Hurricane Sandy is obviously a huge story. As with
any big story the challenge is finding a new angle, something to capture people’s
attention and beat out the competition. When news agencies resort to publicising
the rants of the mentally ill and delusional though they degrade the integrity
of journalism and diminish the true impact of the hurricane on the lives of
innocent people. Conspiracy theories can be fun to read but at the end of the
day they are not news and must never be treated as though they are or else the
real news will be lost in the maelstrom.
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