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Tsunami coverage

By Byron T. Scott Posted Apr 1 2005

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On Dec. 26, newsrooms of Western nations, staffed largely by juniors and interns unable to get holiday leave, dozed amid the predictable and cliché stories of the season. An undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean quickly changed all that. The resulting tsunami brought walls of water, sudden death and destruction to 11 nations.

Victims, governments, militaries, relief agencies and the press were all caught unprepared. Unlike war, the tsunami was an unanticipated crisis. The scale of the damage, in distance and degree, was unprecedented, dwarfing in size events like the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

How well did the media perform in the face of what was arguably the world’s most devastating natural disaster? Although there is no definite answer, it is clear that there are lessons to be learned for journalists who will report on crisis situations in the future. To help highlight these issues, the following is an overview of the stages of tsunami coverage from around the world – from the media’s initial slow start to their more comprehensive look at worldwide relief efforts to their gradual tapering off of coverage that may have come too soon and with too little context.

AN UNPREPARED PRESS AWAKENS

Most Western journalists were not in their newsrooms on December 26. At home or traveling, they had to be recalled and hurried to the scene. International correspondents came thousands of miles, the nearest from Beijing or Bombay, Jakarta or Johannesburg. International news agencies, like CNN, The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Press and the BBC, that depend heavily on local stringers, functioned with difficulty in those early hours. A few journalists had been taking holiday vacations in the region, principally on the beaches of Thailand. They hadn’t expected to need their laptops or satellite phones. First reports were sketchy, contradictory and local.

Death toll estimates rose steadily and often varied by more than 100,000. Some media focused on deaths specific to their location while others lumped tsunami deaths into official death tolls. On the same day, Jan. 8, The Times in London displayed, “Thousands missing as British death toll passes 400,” South China Morning Post reported, “City’s death toll rises to 14; 58 still on the missing list,” focusing on Hong Kong, and a Washington Post headline read, “Confirmed Death Toll From Tsunami Rises to 147,000.”

EYEWITNESSES EMERGE

Within the first 24 hours, the first home videos, shot by tourists, began surfacing on world TV screens. At first, Western media included very few personal accounts from the actual residents of the affected areas. Audiences knew they were there, but reporters had yet to reach them. Instead, tearful survivors, mostly European holiday-seekers, told their stories from airports. Others, reached by international news agencies like National Public Radio and the BBC, gave emotional, disjointed accounts of Christmas party afterglow ended by mountains of sea and mud. For every survivor story there were multiple interviews with anxious relatives back home, unable to make contact with missing loved ones.

FIRST-RESPONDER JOURNALISTS ARRIVE

Many journalists in areas hit by the tsunami were victims themselves. The newspaper Serambi Indonesia in the Banda Aceh province of Indonesia, for example, lost 51 of its 193 staff in the disaster. However, ten journalists continued publication in a nearby city on Jan. 2, producing only a tenth of their usual circulation. As international reporters arrived, the geographic immensity of the tsunami damage forced many of them to first stop in familiar areas to find fixers and translators they trusted from previous stories. Viewers began to see helicopter shots of Indonesia’s Banda Aceh, the resorts of Thailand and the coastal towns of India. On the African continent, correspondents who had covered Somalia’s civil wars gathered in half-forgotten hotel lobbies. Still there were whole nations left virtually unmentioned in the first days of coverage.

In fact, some journalists may have gotten “there” too soon. When the Chicago Tribune’s Beijing correspondent, Michael Lev, got to Meulobah in West Aceh on Dec. 27, he and his translator were detained by military authorities. “Based on the questions asked us, I suspect the army was only interested in how we were able to get through military checkpoints,” Lev later wrote of the experience on Asia Media.

Within several days, however, Lev and other reporters were allowed to work under a temporary lifting of Indonesian government restrictions – with the provison that they concentrate on tsunami-related relief efforts. Similar restrictions were encountered by journalists arriving in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Somalia and Sri Lanka. “Stay near the shore, stay on the story,” they were told. Interviews with organizations like Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, were heavily discouraged.

RELIEF EFFORTS POUR IN

Early and continuing coverage focused heavily on pledges for aid to the stricken regions. Governments competed with businessmen, rock stars, soccer players and a battalion of concerned citizens from around the world in their offers to help. From the relief concerts in Hong Kong and Japan to record donations in Russia, everyone wanted to help and the world’s media were full of stories chronicling massive financial relief efforts.

South African papers touted the $10,000 in donations by Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest nations, while Asian papers applauded typically reclusive North Korea for its contributions.

Familiar news angles also began creeping into this type of tsunami story. Media from Germany to Lebanon, for example, wondered if the United States was too slow and offering proportionately too little to help.

AT-HOME IMPLICATIONS EXPLORED

Tsunami-related stories dominated the media agenda through the early weeks of January, and a good deal of attention turned to at-home impact and implications. “Could this happen to us?” dominated headlines from Brazil, Japan, the Caribbean and virtually every other nation with a coastline. Experts’ answers were usually accompanied by explanatory sidebars or major pieces on how tsunamis actually happen and how detectors usually operate. Countries like China began reporting on ASEAN nations’ efforts to devise tsunami preparedness strategies, and an on-going discussion emerged regarding the need for greater global cooperation in devising an effective and immediate detection system.

LOCALIZED COVERAGE GAINS MOMENTUM

By mid-January, embassies and consulates had sorted out the missing, dead and living among visitors from other nations. At-home reporters did these interviews and follow-ups. In the region, much of the coverage was provided by international news agencies. Very few reporters from individual newspapers or television stations found their way to the tsunami zone, with the exception of the Arab press, eager to cover an area that includes the highest proportion of Muslims in the world.

By this time, perhaps belatedly, local victims began dominating both local and international stories. Stories surfaced of recovery and rebuilding, finding lost relatives, children having limbs amputated, widows having babies, fishermen returning to the sea. A formulaic format emerged showing survivors returning home to destroyed villages, confronted with devastation, disease and, perhaps, hope.

Datelines began to vary, and the scope of tsunami stories began to widen. Issues ranged from the largely discredited accusations of orphaned children sold into the sex trade to reports on ecologists’ charges that removal of mangrove swamps and offshore reefs by developers had stripped nature’s natural defense mechanisms. The stories from the now-organized media were provided largely by now-organized government and relief spokespeople.

TSUNAMI RELEGATED TO WEEKLY FEATURE

Within less than two months, what was arguably the world’s largest natural disaster was largely in the care of freelancers or stringers gathered from the survivors of the regional press and the occasional staffer on assignment for a fortnight. Stories continued to emerge, but mostly found themselves in Sunday feature sections or the waning minutes of nightly newscasts. The quality of attention – by audiences and journalists alike – dropped considerably, as did the quality of editing: one worldwide broadcaster covered the tsunami-region travels of two former American presidents for half a day with on-screen labels identifying George Bush, Sr. as Bill Clinton and vice-versa.

As international aid workers began diving into the relief work, journalists seemed to be retreating. One reason for this was an impression by many editors that audiences had heard, read, and seen enough. In making this judgment, international journalism may have missed an opportunity to provide something the thousands of tsunami stories largely lacked: context.

The confusion inherent in the crisis coverage was compounded by the timing, size and scale of the disaster. While maps showing the affected nations appeared early on, the individual nations soon became a confused mass of common tragedy in all but the most careful stories. Regardless of datelines, stories crowded together to suggest that things were pretty much the same in Indonesia as Sri Lanka and in Kenya as Bangladesh. The images and interviews that emerged were in danger of becoming stereotypes in the public mind.

Audiences saw an Andaman Islander firing an arrow up at a rescue helicopter, for example, but how much did that tell us about the dying cultures of indigenous islanders? And while media brimmed with images of body bags outside collapsed resort hotels, how much exploration was given to why those hotels were built so close to the beach? And what cultural, political and economic conditions had made so many villagers so vulnerable?

A’an Suryana, a journalist who covered the disaster from Banda Aceh from late December to mid-January, says that context was often missing from tsunami coverage in media reports from around the world. “The media has been doing well, but they tended to cover and observe the situation that they saw in the field and not find out what was going on inside,” he said. Suryana, who works on the National Desk at The Jakarta Post in Indonesia, noted that issues such as corruption never ran high in media coverage.

Affected Indian Ocean nations include India, the most-populated democracy in the world, Indonesia, with the world’s highest concentration of Muslims, and Somalia, an oil-producing country still facing a four-year drought. The devastated region also includes countries with a variety of civil wars, dictators and chronic trouble spots, such as Myanmar and Bangladesh. The media may return to these stories, piecemeal, as they occur and recur. The people of these nations will understand historical and cultural framework and see these slowly emerging reports through a wider, contextual lens. But the audiences of the same nations whose editors were awakened from a holiday doze now know very little more – and in the clumping of reports from the vast tsunami zone, possibly less – about an important part of the world than they did before last Dec. 26.

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By the numbers: Journalists not spared

The board of trustees of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has approved $1 million in emergency funding to three international journalism organizations to work together to aid print and broadcast journalists in northwest Indonesia in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

The following information is from a report by the International Federation of Journalists: “Shaking our Foundations.”

Indonesia:

Serambi Indonesia, the only daily newspaper in Banda Aceh, lost 51 of its 193 staff in the tsunami. The newspaper s two-story building was severely damaged, its printing presses were wrecked, and the housing compound next door, where many employees lived, was leveled. For almost a week, there was no Serambi. Soon after, ten journalists were putting out a diminished circulation – 10,000 copies, distributed free at first to reachable areas. Asia Media says the paper is now running with 28 journalists and looking for a new building.

In Banda Aceh, 11 radio stations were either damaged or destroyed and four radio stations in the Meulaboh area demolished. At least two of them went back on air in late January due to a donation of just over $100,000 by the Media Development Loan Fund.

Public broadcasters in Indonesia, Televisi Republik Indonesia and Radio Republik Indonesia, report 34 members of their staffs missing.

A total of 70 media workers in Banda Aceh are presumed dead after their houses were destroyed.

Sri Lanka:

About 58 percent of the more than 2,000 provincial Sri Lankan journalists are from the 14 Sri Lanka districts affected by the tsunami.

Two journalists are still missing.

Many journalists have lost homes and media equipment.

India:

There have been no reports of journalists harmed.

India's public TV broadcast station, Doordarshan, reports that some of its TV transmitters in the northern part of the Nicobar Islands were damaged by the waves.

Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and East Africa:

No journalists were reported as injured or missing.

Changing faces

The media’s role in the aftermath of the tsunami has become that of informant, fund-raiser, even family locator. Media efforts have changed from solely reporting news to helping rebuild, locate and inspire hope.

Sri Lankan journalist Feizal Samath reported for Asia Media how the media help to rebuild communities. Before the tsunami, the biggest natural crisis to hit Sri Lanka was a cyclone that killed 1,000 people in 1978. That year, with only a handful of newspapers and radio stations, the media had a small presence. Now, Samath says, there are sufficient television channels and radio stations in Sri Lanka to stir action and relief efforts. The media steer efforts and repeatedly use pictures, names and details of missing people. “The media has turned the entire nation into a relief and rehabilitation center,” says Samath. “In retrospect, the Sri Lankan media performed a tremendous job, often setting aside competition and gains and indulging in an atmosphere of cooperation.”

In Indonesia two subsidiaries of the Media Group, Media Indonesia and Metro TV, help in the search for the missing. Those looking for loved ones search through news footage that could hold photos of those who are missing. Then, the station can pinpoint when and where the footage was taken. For those searching, the television station has started a program called “Window of Love” as an outlet for storytelling about missing relatives.

Indonesia’s Radio 68H had four out of 14 partner stations destroyed. After the tsunami, the station sent resources to surviving radio journalists and has helped raise $13,000 for the “We Care for Aceh” program, which has built 32 fresh-water wells in Aceh. Donations can be made at http://indonesia-donations.mdlf.org.

- Compiled By Laura Girresch