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Going beyond body counts and helicopter journalism
I was once affected by a disaster - when my house in suburban Colombo was flooded out for several days during the great Colombo flood of June 1992. Yet, I was among the luckier ones - I had an upper floor to take refuge in, and suffered only minor damage compared to those who lost much more. Partly due to this experience, I now take a greater interest in the technical and social aspects of disasters - especially how information and communication play a part in these complex processes.

Few events stir up emotion as disasters, and usually the blame game clouds rational judgement and hinders both technical solutions and relief measures. This was the case in 1992, when the blame fell on irresponsible local governments, property developers and town planners.

Our mass media devoted much space and time for discussing the 1992 floods because it directly affected many media professionals. Few floods before or since have attracted that level of coverage - which demonstrates the massive urban bias that this country's almost entirely city-based mass media continue to have.

This is precisely the point that my former colleague Lakshman Gunasekera made in a paper on the news media and disasters in Sri Lanka, presented at a South Asian policy forum on the subject. According to Mr. Gunasekera, the flood of June 1992 temporarily displaced several thousand people and received enormous coverage. Not only was there spot-reporting on a large scale, but also the follow-up coverage went on for months after the event, with editorials, articles, letters to the editor, and commentaries by experts. There were persistent demands by the media “to know who should be responsible for the floods. There was also a rigorous examination of the city's drainage system.”

By contrast, a much larger flood took place in December 1993, covering nearly one third of the country in the Northern, North-Central and Eastern Provinces. Despite its greater impact, that flood did not receive half as much media coverage, even though at least twice as many people were affected for a longer period.

This and many other perceptive insights into how the South Asian media cover disasters are captured in Disaster Communication: A Resource Kit for Media that has been compiled by Duryog Nivaran, a network of South Asian individuals and organizations committed to promoting alternative perspectives on disasters. The book, authored by Amjad Bhatti and Madhavi Malalgoda Ariyabandu, has been published by ITDG South Asia in Colombo and the Journalists Resource Centre in Islamabad, Pakistan. It builds on other publications, research and events organized by this network over the past decade to persuade the 1.5 billion South Asians to see the links between the rising impact of disasters and the vulnerability of human society.

The challenges they face are formidable indeed. In this sub-region that has attracted more than its fair share of poverty, misery and depravation, attempting to change attitudes is a daunting task.

Analysing disaster communication in South Asian media provides a magnifying glass that shows up many and wide anomalies that affect the media and society as a whole.

And the Sri Lankan media are by no means unique in their coverage. The book cites interesting examples from all over Asia. Urban bias is one among many biases and distortions seen in the coverage of disasters. Elite bias is another. "We have seen if the PM visits some calamity-hit area, every reporter will rush there and report disaster, otherwise no one bothers to go out in the field and cover miseries," says Mazhar Arif, a former press secretary to a President of Pakistan.

To be fair by journalists, they have to work against many odds in covering disasters. Events unfold by the minute, and there is much confusion. Reliable assessments of damage are not always forthcoming, and some disaster sites are not easily accessible. In such situations, they have to improvise, and make do with whatever is available, and speak to whomever is contactable. In this process, distortions can occur.

But that's no excuse for sloppy journalism. Leafing through the book, I was constantly reminded of a truism that is touted by journalism professors. Referring to the value that American news agencies assign to life in the majority world, it has been said: “10,000 deaths in Nepal = 100 deaths in Wales = 10 deaths in West Virginia = one death next door.” It's not only the western media that are guilty of this. A dozen desperate farmers committing suicide in Polonnaruwa has never had the same impact on our own media as one disgruntled businessman shooting himself.

Then there is the sudden-slow bias. The media treat sudden disasters and slow-onset disasters very differently. To most of the media, the slowly creeping disasters are non-issues. Floods, landslides, earthquakes and cyclones get on to the front page or prime time news because they have geo-meteorological characteristics of suddenness.

But disasters like drought, desertification, ecological degradation, deforestation as well as epidemics such as tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS move slowly and steadily to erode the lives and livelihoods of many people. Such processes lack the snappiness to attract media professionals in search of that dramatic photo, moving image or soundbite. They also don't offer the media what Swapan Dasgupta, a deputy editor of India Today, has identified:

"Disaster reporting in India has traditionally followed a formula. First there are the gruesome horror stories, followed by accusations that the government wilfully connived in the disaster, followed by the stories of how official machinery is insensitive to the sufferings, followed by the alarmist fears of epidemics, and finally, the expose of the wholesale loot of relief material." There also has to be panic, horror and drama in a story to win media attention.

These are but a few striking examples in the well-researched book that illustrate how a good part of the South Asian media landscape qualifies as a slow-creeping disaster by itself. The 1.5 billion worth (people, not dollars) question is: why aren't there enough Gunasekeras and Chowdhurys in South Asia to form a critical mass that will change how the media cover human development and human survival issues, including disasters? Why isn't their perceptive brilliance more widely shared?

The book goes on to advocate a 'Paradigm shift' from the current, highly anomalous ways of perceiving and communicating disasters to an alternative approach. One that involved media and communications systems in South Asia as integral partners in preventing some disasters, and in mitigating or managing the impact of others. It offers extremely useful, and specific enough suggestions on how to see disasters differently, and how media can become part of the solution instead of being an aggravator of the problem.

The authors have also compiled an extensive dossier of data and information on one hundred years of disasters in South Asia (1900-2000), a disaster related dictionary of terms, and country profiles.

Part of the answer to my question posed above is found in the book itself, though not perhaps in the way the authors intended. This book shares a weakness with many others meant to influence the way journalists and media organizations conducts themselves: It's a bit text-bookish and at times, tends to preach. I am also amused to see the phrase "paradigm shift" popping up frequently - social scientists can be as jargon-immersed as natural scientists when it comes to communicating their ideas!

Intellectual jargon such as 'paradigm shift' is to the social sciences what equations are to physics - they all put readers off. A major challenge for Duryog Nivaran is to peddle these home truths in palatable packaging so as to win more media friends and influence their attitude and conduct.

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