When It Rain It Pours: Reality Shows and Charades for Climate Change Tragedies

In September 2013, Mexico was quashed by two hurricanes during the same week. One came from the pacific and the other form the Gulf of Mexico. The consequences were tragic and colossal. The days prior to the storms the Mexican government was warned by the Mexican National Weather Service about the magnitude of the catastrophes coming, but they were more focused on ‘cleaning off’ a teacher’s demonstration at Mexico City’s main square. National TV networks were mainly focused on blasting the teacher’s movement. And only when it was too late they started a campaign to help and rescue the victims. One of the actions that became particularly emblematic was the preparation of a reality show screening an infamous TV presenter heroically 'helping' the victims. The farce was unmasked by a very important Mexican political magazine and one of the main journalists questioned the staging, the TV presenter has a very belligerent reaction. The scandal is in progress at the moment of submitting this abstract. Social networks are been particularly virulent at this point. In this presentation, it will be shown how this episode could be explained using sociocybernetics tools and following previous presentations of the author, it will be developed how critical sociocybernetics model would work to explain media performance and the emerging role of cyber-activists in the face of climate change disasters.