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The position and the role of a journalist on the spot after an unexpected disaster. Dr Bertil Galland, Writer and Historian, Buxy, France.
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The position and the role of a journalist on the spot after an unexpected disaster
Almost immediately after the critical event there is the arrival of hundreds of journalists, TV crews etc. This crowd of rival reporters contributes to the chaotic pattern of the scene.
What of the apparent privilege, to be the man “on the spot”?
The truth: it is impossible to quickly gather all the elements of the real situation. The victims, the human drama, the combined reports of the police, firemen, medical attendants and other first responder groups all add to the confusion.
What is the driving force, to express by words, pictures or filmed sequences what is happening?
The driving force in the media is not on the scene: but it is the News Desk back home. They decided to send a reporter or a team. It costs money to the media. The Newsroom expects an immediate result and the Newsroom very quickly after the event decides in a rough way what it was all about. They know better!
The reporter, often alone on the spot, is under pressure. Within a couple of hours he must send his story and while rhetoric might cover the blank spots it is quite impossible in such short space of time to give a balanced account of the facts.
Pressure No 1 – The pack of media people all scrambling to know. But collectively a certain feeling of what happened takes shape very quickly and it might be false. It requires a strong character to resist an interpretation of the facts backed by a majority of the media crowd.
Pressure No 2 – (maybe the most important) What the Newsroom expects – the people there are the boss. A reporter who happens to know the place where the disaster has taken place, the ethnic or social context, the political background etc is not in an advantageous position. Every “attempt to explain” is depriving his story of its dramatic dimension and will be misjudged by the Newsroom - a story beside the event is a bad story. Background can come later.
Pressure No 3 – The safety belt of the reporter is the Press Conference – the police, hospital, political authorities talk. The endless corrections or updates of the number of victims use up the precious time of the reporter. He is anxious to have missed the latest official reports (and this becomes part of Pressure No1). Meanwhile he does not have enough hours for the legwork required to meet all kinds of people in a position to testify, and also understand the scene of the violence and measure the extent of the impact.
While the reporter fights his way into the facts with only the questions, the Newsroom back home have followed all the news, agency reports and TV broadcasts, and they think – actually they are adamant - that they know. The reporter on the spot has to adopt at least in part the vision of the Newsroom, because he was not in a position to follow all the news. The Newsroom puts in the titles!
Those being the conditions of the first hours, there are great possibilities of collective errors or of unnecessary disputes over certain facts. There are frequent attempts at manipulation in the Press Conferences. Political actors want to promote themselves, prevent accusations of mismanagement; they put their accent on the human side of the disaster. The failures of the rescue after Hurricane Katrina were progressively discovered. If on the contrary, a reporter on the spot discovers that the disaster is limited (some streets away daily life goes on undisturbed) he, and particularly the TV team, are professionally required to avoid such an image. The assignment is to concentrate the pictures on the most dramatic details, otherwise the money spent on the story is considered as lost.
Yes, experience shows that divergent or less dramatic views on the event can be dismissed by the Newsroom. The reporter and TV teams follow its requirements, and the Newsroom follows the emotions of the public. The terrorists know that. They speculate on the enlarging power of the media, adapting their tactics, aims and methods in this perspective.
There is a great irrational part in the gathering of information and the media are very prone to the well known psychology of the crowd. The reporters themselves are assembled in a crowd, with a group psychology.
But, more thorough research and stories can be completed in the following days where the quality of certain journalists becomes evident coming from a deeper knowledge of the context and a higher level of curiosity. Nevertheless, the immediate image can in some cases be elevated to a graphic symbol of an event (e.g. the Chinese student alone facing a tank is Tienamen; the naked girl running in a village on fire is Vietnam etc). Whether this symbolic image reflects the historical truth could be discussed but the image enters with this focus into the collective conscience of humanity. All photographers strive to take, in all those violent events, “the picture that tells the whole story”. These are rare. The media are submerged by the “expected” pictures according to the pattern of preconceived set-ups and misinterpretations and even shot by the photographers “on command”. The media could tell you in advance which kind of picture they would expect in any circumstance (ie a case of an A or B or C terrorist act). Many photographers and TV crews will follow this lead instead of seeking other views. The street scenes after bomb attacks have become completely stereotyped.
In conclusion, to know the “truth” about an event a reporter must go into details and take a fresh look. This takes time. It is by a certain “scientific” curiosity and by intuition that he must choose among the multiple aspects of a disaster to decide where to fix and focus his attention. The lazy way is to cover the Press Conferences and ignore what was not mentioned; what happened in the area beyond the disaster; in the family of the victims and of the terrorists. In any event there is a huge grey zone that escapes totally the attention of the press. A recent example is Iran. There were very few pictures and reports about street demonstrations in cities and regions other than Teheran. What really happened in the country?
