Disaster Journalism

It is perhaps only when they become a part of the story they are reporting that journalists realise just what a narrow segment of reality they depict in the coverage of a crisis.

This is especially true when foreign correspondents report on a disaster like the earthquake that hit Nepal on 25 April 2015. 

For the first seven days, as videos and photographs of a devastated city were broadcast around the world on TV and the internet, my family got frantic calls from friends and relatives. They seemed surprised that we were still alive, that our house was intact, we had food and water, or that they could even make that phone call.  

Like everyone else, they had seen images of Kathmandu Valley’s historic monuments reduced to rubble, piles of bricks where people’s homes used to be, and photographs taken from rescue helicopters of destroyed villages clinging precariously to steep mountainsides. These apocalyptic scenes had convinced them that nothing was left.

Yet 80% of the houses in Kathmandu Valley were intact. Even in the historic heart of the city, the main temples and palaces were still there. The only thing different in most neighbourhoods after the earthquake was that there weren’t the usual traffic jams.

In fact the first foreign correspondents to parachute in the next morning were surprised on the drive into the city that they didn’t spot a single ruined building. Had they flown into the wrong hotspot by mistake?

Many of us in the media are accused of distortion by being selective in what we choose to report. Some foreign correspondents are careful not to fall into that trap -- trying instead to break away from stereotypical coverage and catch a deeper understanding of what is really happening beneath the surface, or away from the spotlight. Still, there is a formula for news and it’s hard to file a story that doesn’t fit it.

Which is why after every disaster it is, quite literally, the same old story.

The international media arrives in herds and hunts in packs. Everything has to conform to a preordained script: you parachute in and immediately find good visuals of ‘utter devastation’; recruit an English-speaking local who does not need subtitling; trail the rescue teams with sniffer dogs you flew in with.

Then it’s back to the hotel bar to swap stories of derring-do, before calling the desk to plan tomorrow’s story of slow government response, and the day after tomorrow’s account of yet another survivor pulled out alive. After that, get a ride in a rescue helicopter for the out-of-town visual of utter devastation in a remote mountain village.

To my knowledge no foreign correspondent went around shooting streets in which all the buildings were still standing. They did not have time to look at farmers harvesting potatoes by the roadside as they rushed to pan across more historic ruins. Few ever reported that only 14 of Nepal’s 75 districts were affected. 

No-one found it extraordinary or newsworthy that the phones were working, that they could tweet even from the hinterland, or that Kathmandu got back electricity in three days. Such bits of information didn’t fit the script.

TV crews from the BBC, Al-Jazeera and others had pitched their tents (with their own Honda generators) next to each other in Kathmandu’s Darbar Square, to frame the ruins of the Hanuman Dhoka palace as the backdrop to invited talking heads. No wonder TV news programs are called ‘shows’.

One interviewee was asked if he could dim the lights for a Skype interview to make it look like things were really dark in post-earthquake Kathmandu. A scheduled live stand-up with a local journalist by CNN’s Anderson Cooper was cancelled at 4am local time because they were rioting in Baltimore.

Such disaster reporting distorts the scale of destruction, either exaggerating the damage or not highlighting the areas where things are much worse. Because competing TV channels are in the same helicopter, there is a temptation to over-dramatise, embellish and overstate. And countries like Nepal better have their disasters on a slow news day in North America.

Soon, it was time to leave and travel to another disaster zone. Many international reporters had left by the time the aftershock hit on 12 May, destroying homes already weakened by the main quake.

The media distorts reality by disproportionate coverage. Facts do not add up to the truth when we are selective in choosing what to report. Facts, in fact, can lie. Similarly, when the scale of the disaster is too big to comprehend the screen is just not wide enough to show the immensity of an avalanche that obliterates a village of 500 inhabitants, like it did in Langtang. 

The challenge now is to keep the international spotlight on Nepal as the country rebuilds. But the media pack has left, and with it the headlines that keep the crisis alive. Already, donations for relief and rehabilitation have started tapering off.

Kunda Dixit

Reprinted from BBC Academy on 26 May 2015. For a longer version of this piece, go to BBC Academy Blogs.