Outside the Games, a Bigger Tragedy

Jim Lehrer began “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS Wednesday--in the second week of the Barcelona Olympics--by introducing “the worst story in the world.”

Was it the U.S. volleyball team getting a raw deal against Japan?

Or the Dream Team’s fat cats refusing to stay in the Olympic village with other athletes?

Or a flap in the 10,000-meter race that led briefly to the Moroccan gold-medal winner being disqualified?

Or the U.S.’ favored Michael Johnson not making the 200-meter finals?

Or the U.S. baseball team’s failure to get a medal?

Or the U.S. women’s basketball team’s shocking upset by a team of former Soviets?

Or computer-scoring snafus and referee incompetence tainting the boxing competition?

Demonstrating that whatever you’re in the center of assumes epic proportions, the usually thoughtful, level-headed boxing commentators on cable’s Olympics TripleCast went on and on for about 15 minutes earlier this week, loudly railing about a referee’s action that cost U.S. light-heavyweight Montell Griffin victory over his German opponent.

Enough already. From the level of their protests, you’d have thought these guys had just witnessed some kind of holocaust.

Well, the Olympics are fun to watch and get whipped up over. Yet despite their value as entertainment to viewers and significance to individual participants--some of whom are competing for lucrative endorsement and commercial contracts as well as medals--they are games.

Despite the media-driven intense interest in these hour-by-hour Olympics dramas, their relevance is fleeting, their importance of the moment, their tragedies small in the scheme of other things.

The Olympics have been scarred by genuine tragedy too, witness the terrorist slaughter of Israelis at the 1972 Munich event. NBC devoted a retrospective to it Tuesday night.

Yet this week’s holocausts, captured so vividly by television, were occurring elsewhere.

On the screen following Lehrer’s introduction, for example, were pictures of almost indescribable horrors. “Hell on Earth,” he accurately called violence-torn, famine-ravaged, death-gored Somalia in East Africa, where thousands are said to be dying daily and burial is by conveyor belt.

Television’s clashing realities.

Walter Lippman’s description of the press in 1922--as “the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode then another out of darkness into vision”--is especially applicable to TV in 1992.

While NBC and the TripleCast beam back coverage of the Summer Games, where allegiance to global sisterhood and brotherhood is the prevailing lip service, other searchlights are falling on the decimated regions of Somalia and the Balkanized area of Europe formerly identified monolithically as Yugoslavia.

These stories, of “ethnic cleansing” and other examples of inhumane treatment of humans, are more moving even than athletes overcoming adversity to compete in the Olympics.

More moving even than a sprinter being helped to the finish line by his father after suffering a leg injury.

More moving even than American medal winners getting moist-eyed during the national anthem.

How moving?

Network newscasts this week showed pictures of those Bosnian refugee children fleeing to Germany from Sarajevo, and showed the bodies of two who died when their escape bus was riddled by Serb snipers. TV also showed the shelling of a Sarajevo cemetery during the funeral for the two dead youngsters, showed one of their grandmothers being carried away with serious wounds as terrified screams merged with the sounds of mortars.

However, it was “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour”--in those deathwatch sights from warring Somalia, where factional fighting has killed the innocent and blocked food from reaching the starving masses--that showcased TV’s unique ability to convey the depths of trauma and the most painful of human tragedies.

“Please be warned some of the pictures are graphic and difficult to watch,” Lehrer said. It was just about unbearable.

On the screen were children--barely alive skeletons--too weak even to move, waiting to die by starvation in areas cut off by fighting. Some of them seemed to be emitting soft squeaks or squeals, the sounds of death. A 12-year-old skeleton pulled his dying 3-year-old brother into his arms. It was hard to imagine either of them surviving another day.

Undeniably, such scenes have attracted much less coverage in the West than the carnage in Bosnia. “Somehow an African death, or a Chinese death, is not (seen as being) as important as a European death,” John Healey of Amnesty International charged in a panel discussion after the news report from Somalia. “Something has to be done larger than life,” he said.

But no one seemed optimistic that would happen.

Everything larger than life was happening in Barcelona, where nationalist fervor was running high and an ad hoc community of nations was once again deploying athletes as television metaphors for peace and good will toward all.

Meanwhile, “the worst story in the world” continues to hemorrhage. And tomorrow in Somalia, Healey predicted, “thousands of people are going to die.”