Recently there has been a natural disaster at your place Youtube trowel your levet best to secure the lives of the victims of your locality and also the downtrodden ones. Write an informal letter to your friend, Almost Ashmita, focusing on the camera happiness lies in making others happy
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News > Media > TV & Radio
Catastrophe on camera: Why media coverage of natural disasters is flawed
When a natural disaster happens, we watch from afar, transfixed by dramatic news reports. But how accurate is the picture?
By Patrick Cockburn
Thursday 20 January 2011 01:00
Catastrophe on camera: Why media coverage of natural disasters is flawed
The media generally assume that news of war, crime and natural disasters will always win an audience. "If it bleeds, it leads," is a well-tried adage of American journalism. Of the three categories, coverage of war has attracted criticism for its lies, jingoism and general bias. Crime reporting traditionally exaggerates the danger of violence in society, creating an unnecessary sense of insecurity.
Media coverage of natural disasters – floods, blizzards, hurricanes, earthquakes and volcanoes – is, on the contrary, largely accepted as an accurate reflection of what really happened. But in my experience, the opposite is true: the reporting of cataclysms or lesser disasters is often wildly misleading. Stereotyping is common: whichever the country involved, there are similar images of wrecked bridges, half-submerged houses and last-minute rescues.
The scale of the disaster is difficult to assess from news coverage: are we seeing or reading about the worst examples of devastation, or are these the norm? Are victims in the hundreds or the millions? Most usually the extent of the damage and the number of casualties are exaggerated, particularly in the developed world. I remember covering floods on the Mississippi in the 1990s and watching as a wall of cameras and cameramen focused on a well-built house in a St Louis suburb which was slowly disappearing under the water. But just a few hundred yards away, ignored by all the cameramen, a long line of gamblers was walking unconcernedly along wooden walkways to board a river boat casino.
The reporting of natural disasters appears easy, but it is difficult to do convincingly. Over the past year, a series of calamities or, at the least, surprisingly severe weather, has dominated the news for weeks at a time. Just over a year ago, Haiti had its worst earthquake in 200 years, which killed more than 250,000 people. In August, exceptionally heavy monsoon rain turned the Indus river into a vast dangerous lake, forcing millions of Pakistani farmers to flee their homes and take refuge on the embankments. Less devastating was unexpectedly heavy snow in Britain in December and the severe blizzard which struck New York at Christmas. In the first half of January, the news was once again being led by climatic disasters: the floods in Queensland and the mudslides in Brazil.
All these events are dramatic and should be interesting, but the reporting of them is frequently repetitious and dull. This may be partly because news coverage of all disasters, actual or forecast, is delivered in similarly apocalyptic tones. Particularly in the US, weather dramas are so frequently predicted that dire warnings have long lost their impact. This helps to explain why so many people are caught by surprise when there is a real catastrophe, such as Hurricane Katrina breaking the levees protecting New Orleans in 2005 and flooding the city. US television news never admits the role it plays in ensuring that nobody takes warnings of floods and hurricanes too seriously because they have heard it all before.
Governments are warier than they used to be in dealing with disasters, conscious of the political damage they will suffer if they are seen as unfeeling or unresponsive to climatic emergencies. The best-remembered single picture of the New Orleans flood is probably not of water rushing through the streets, but of President Bush peering at it with distant interest out of the window of his aircraft from several thousand feet above the devastation.
UK natural disasters are, thanks to the mild climate, not really in the same league as other countries'. Flooding in the Lake District hardly compares with what happened in Brisbane. The same broken or unsafe bridges are filmed again and again. The tone of the reporting is always doleful and, at times, funereal. Worst cases are presented as typical. The pre-Christmas snow and consequent transport difficulties were spoken of as if everybody in Britain spent their entire time longing to get to work instead of welcoming an excuse to stay at home. The simple pleasure of not having to do anything is underplayed and there is never a mention of the fact that the cities and countryside of Britain are at their most beautiful when they are under a blanket of snow.