Disastrous news judgment
As coverage of the Haiti earthquake continues, a recent SPJ statement reminds journalists of the balance between covering the news and stepping outside that role to help, which shouldn’t be done just because it would make a good story.
In a different vein, Rebecca Solnit wrote in Salon about the tone of media coverage after disasters. In particular, she suggests that accusations of “looting” in so much news coverage is fundamentally wrong.
I like her reality-driven rewrites for photo captions.
January 24th, 2010 at 3:37 am
An excellent essay by Solnit! It’s about media coverage of disasters but far more than that.
To sum up her point: The news media, through cliches of language and thought and professional conventions, are often complicit in casting understandable acts of human survival as criminality.
Because the SPJ statement was so general — too general in my view — I think the distinction was lost between the tireless reporting of so many journalists and the questionable ethical behavior of a few of them (and their corporate employers).
I am not troubled by journalists helping the survivors in the course of their reporting (as an AP reporter did in bringing water to 84 elderly survivors he found and wrote about who were living in horrific, live-threatening circumstances and received no water or help from authorities for days after he called attention to their plight); that is basic human compassion and certainly comes under the heading of “Minimize Harm” in the SPJ Code of Ethics. What DOES annoy me is when a news organization makes its own participation the focus of its stories and, in the process, calls into question the veracity or significance or relevance of its reports. It should never be left to the reader, viewer or listener to distinguish between reportage and promotion or branding.
A good example of the kind of assistance that DOES disturb me was the TV medical reporters who operated on camera for their viewers, blurring the line between reporter and participant. The viewers would be justified in questioning whether those cases were the ones most deserving of medical attention; whether such operations were the best use of emergency medical help (as opposed, for example, to triage) and, of course, whether that clinic and supplies that doctor/reporter was using were representative of the medical clinics and supplies available elsewhere in that devastated capital, where no celebrity doctor was present.