At 9 p.m.,November 27, 2008, the Western tradition of Thanksgiving, the “Hero” Annual Selection Award was world-wide live. Another 10 ordinary people chosen by CNN became the brightest star, attracted the attention of hundreds of millions of viewers.
It is undeniable that those elected have made impressive moving deeds. There is Liz McCartney who determinedly resigned her job after Hurricane Katrina and returned home to help people rebuild their homes; there is Phymean Noun who offered hundreds of children who work in Phnom Penh’s trash dump a way out through free schooling and job training.
Some media believe that the selection is based on typical deeds of global civilian, audience will have a sense of closeness and treat those heroes as wide-ranging models. Above all, the most valuable thing is that there is not commercial opeartion in their behavior.
However, I still cannot agree with the practice of creating heroes for the public.
From journalism point of view, even though these great people deserve to be learned and followed, the job of a journalist is to report the story accurately and deliver this information, period. How these meaning ful actions of those heroes affect the public should depend on the public’s natural reaction. People have brains, they do not need the media to tell them what to learn or how to think. People have different definitions for the word “hero”, and it is not professional for people work in media industry to define something.
After many of the civilian being named “hero”, they become famous people. Media values their influences on public at the beginning because they are ordinary people. However, the “hero” selection behavior separates them from the ordinary people. The public wants to know this certain individual more than the people who really need social attention and care in the story. A trophy contraried to the original purpose of the “hero”, because no one loves and cares others in order to get a trophy. In general, it is a cart-before-the-horse thing.
The award also will negatively affect the quiet life of a normal ordinary people. Once a person becomes famous, interviews and questions are gathered to come like cloud. Perhaps he/she wants to have his/her personal space, or he/she would like to refuse to questions from reporters and interviews, but he/she may be branded arrogant and unfriendly .
The saddest thing is that after being known as a “hero”, the person will face the risk of being commercialized. In the major earthquake occurred in Sichuan, China 2008, there is a boy named Lin Hao calmly and effectively organized his classmates, and left the school building without Casualties . After that, what Lin has to face is the influx of praise, high visibility, and interviews. He succeeded to enter the best school in Chengdu without effort, even though he simply could not keep up the progress of that school because of his poor learning basis and the endless television interviews. In an interview, he mentioned actually he was very reluctant to recall those terrible scenes repeately. The praise became a torture for Lin Hao at last. It is nothing else but a irony.
All in all, it is not appropriate for the media to create “heroes”. It is irresponsible to define these people as heroes and bring them huge amount of pressure and controversy. They probably have never expected that the situation could be this complex. Just give back the peaceful life to them because they are such warm-hearted people and need respect. Do not worry about the public may never see those glittering characters, those awards are totally unnecessary and exaggerated.
