Water Shortages & Journalistic Hawthorne Effects
There is something about the following tacit admission in a story about possible Andes water shortages that bugged me:
Informed of the [possible water supply] threat, Quispe, a 37-year-old Aymara Indian, shows alarm on her weathered face. "Where are we going to get water? Without water how can we live?"
So, to summarize: A Western journalist goes to a Bolivian village and confronts an Indian, likely through a translator, tells them a hypothetical beyond their ken -- not to mention dire and world-changing -- and then asked for their reaction. Introducing terrifying hypotheticals to people uniquely ill-equipped to cope with them, is a cheap shot, not to mention demonstrating the Hawthorne effect in journalism.
1
