There was once a time when a disaster in a foreign country didn’t even make the news in your country, let alone have 24 hour picture coverage and journalists camping out to cover it. I’m not saying that was better than knowing what’s going on in the world. I’m not saying that was better than bringing it to people’s attention so they can help with recovery efforts in anyway they can. I am saying it’s better than the outrageous “news” coverage we get today.
I will use the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand as an example. I live in Australia (just across the ditch, as we say). The news broke almost immediately after it happened. The coverage continued all day and night on the TV on all the major stations. The next few days were also predominantly coverage from the earthquake site.
The first few hours of coverage did not bother me as there was new information coming out at a pretty consistent rate. The pictures may have been on a pretty high rotation but the information being presented was being updated. After about four hours, though, the information started being the same thing we’d already heard a few times already.
I know people are going to say, “what about all the shift workers, etc, who haven’t seen or heard the news; they need the information to be repeated.” I’m not saying don’t repeat the information but surely, after 4 hours, we don’t need constant live streaming from the networks. A simply 5 or 10 minute update every hour would have sufficed. Then, as major information came through, they could break from their scheduled programming for that.
Which brings me to my gripe over “breaking news”. The first or second time you tell people, it is breaking news. The fifth time it’s definitely not “breaking”, it’s just news. So many times I saw the networks have BREAKING NEWS plastered across the screen over footage and/or presentations of information that had been on for the last few hours.
I’m trying really hard, not to sound uncaring, but I know some of you will think that. It’s not that I don’t care about the people in the earthquake area. It’s not that I don’t care about the damage it caused. It’s that I don’t care for the TV stations constantly sensationalising everything and running something to the point of people tuning out.
The other problem I have is the sending of the masses of journalists to these disaster zones. Especially when they are not real journalists. They took up space on flights from Australia which could have gone to relatives or emergency service personnel. Not only that, they are not journalists. Take David Koch, from Channel 7’s Sunrise program, as an example. He is basically an accountant who has somehow managed to get a job as a breakfast TV host. He was flown over to report to on the disaster. He is NOT a journalist. The questions he asked (don’t know if he made his own questions, or the staff who write the questions are just incompetent) were juvenile. I’d expect the same sort of questions from lower high school kids. He (or his staff) did no research into the information they were presenting and made no effort to keep up with the updated information.
This effort of “Kochie’s” came off the back of his efforts in the Queensland floods where he clearly made a huge error, then had to come back and correct himself. He didn’t even say he’d gotten it wrong, though, he just said that someone from the premiers office (??? can’t quite remember the source of that information) had rung to tell him the updated information. This was probably true but the same information had gone out A FEW HOURS EARLIER in a news conference (shown on his network) by the Premier of Queensland (Anna Bligh) so if he or his staff had done their jobs properly then this retraction would not have been needed. It just went to make him look like an idiot for not knowing in the first place and for not admitting that he should have known when he had to update the information.
I’m not sure why the networks think we want to see half-arsed reporting. There are plenty of well-versed, TV friendly journalists out there who are a million times better than David Koch. They know what they’re talking about. They know what kinds of questions to ask to get the relevent information out of who they are asking. It reminds of the saying: You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. These TV hosts are not journalists and should stop pretending they are. And it’s not just Channel 7. It’s all the commercial networks in Australia (with the possible exception of SBS, which I don’t really see as a commercial network even though it is). They are all as bad as each other. I just happen to watch Channel 7 during these episodes.
I also object to the intrusion in these people’s lives who are basically doorstopped by these wanna-be journalists and asked to relive what has probably been the most traumatic event in their life. The general public knows that people are suffering. We can imagine but not know what they are going though, unless we have lived it ourselves. I don’t mind the occassional interview with a “victim” but it should be done after they’ve been given a basic psychological assessment as to weather they are ready to deal with some really quite intrusive questions. I also wonder if the people who are interviewed see the final version that goes to air and think, “that’s not how it was” or are just embarrassed to be seen in that state on international TV. In the moment, people don’t think like that. Some people may not want their emotional distress to be splashed across the TV but in the moment may not have the where-with-all to say no to the TV crew and “charming” host who has just lobbed up in their front garden or at the front door. Obviously, the networks need to get permission to air the stories but in that emotional state, how many of those people actually thought about what they were signing, or the implications of being made into a headline?
At the end of the day, the networks are going to do whatever they want but a little social responsibility and little intelligent journalism isn’t too much to ask for, is it?
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