Disaster in Asia

“Core challenge of the day was getting basic information. It exposed the inability of some governments to cope” – Nik Gowing, BBC World TV

It was the story of 2004 and one of the biggest natural disasters in 200 years. Asia’s December 26 earthquake-triggered tsunami killed more than 250,000 people in areas as far apart as Thailand, Indonesia, Burma, India and Sri Lanka, while its effects were also felt on Africa’s eastern coast.

More people were killed – nearly 300,000 – in a Bangladeshi storm surge in 1970 and the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, southwest of Java, changed world weather patterns for five years. But the 2004 tsunami was the first disaster of its kind to impinge on the world’s consciousness, generating a massive international aid response of around $13.0 billion.

A survey of 200 English-language newspapers by AlertNet, an on-line service run by The Reuters Foundation for the international disaster relief community, found that the tsunami alone had more newspaper coverage in the first six weeks than ten other ‘forgotten’ emergencies combined in places such as the Congo and Sudan in the previous 12 months.

The media mobilisation to cover the disaster on a Christian holiday posed problems. They ranged from encountering a frequent lack of quick official information for hungry 24-hour news services to working in politically-sensitive areas such as Indonesia’s northern Aceh region and India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the need to achieve a balance between reporting on casualties from one’s own country and “compassion fatigue”.

“The core challenge of the day was getting basic information. It exposed the inability of some governments to cope,” said Nik Gowing, a main presenter for BBC World TV.

As the disaster developed, Gowing said editors faced a new and serious challenge – an unprecedented number of unofficial sources such as ‘bloggers’ (web diarists) and amateur videos which had to be checked by ‘filtering’ and ‘gatekeeping’ techniques.

“We must always be suspicious about a source which cannot be validated,” he said.

Of a second tsunami-alert some two months after December 26, Gowing said: “We did not know whether there was a tsunami or not, But it became clear after an hour or two that there would not be one. But no government said so. We used people on the internet and locals with mobile (phones)”.

Achara Husbumrer, deputy director-general of the Thai government’s public relations department, said: “(On December 26) we had an initial phone call from an official in Phuket. We had a networking system throughout the country but the line of communications was cut off. We could not even use mobile phones on that day.

For US citizen May Ying Welsh, a Thailand-based correspondent for Channel News Asia International, December 26 started with her covering an economic conference in Bangkok. She then received a call asking her to check out a possible flood in which some people may have been hurt.

“I got to the scene within 11 hours. There were thousands of people looking for loved ones. But it took about 24 hours for us to realise how big it was,” she said. “I covered the disaster from an Asian regional perspective. The challenge for us as journalists was not to get numbed and let the viewers get numbed, to try to make people understand about the suffering so they could be part of the solution.”

On December 26, BBC TV foreign correspondent Jonathan Charles was in the Ukraine covering the political upheaval there. “All of a sudden that story got completely dismissed and I found myself taken to the Nicobar and Andaman islands.”

Other Western journalists in the Ukraine were also redeployed, taking part of the tension out of the volatile Ukraine story as media attention shifted to the tsunami. “When we reached the Andaman and Nicobar islands we faced… significant problems,” said Charles. They included local media accusations of insensitivity by showing “gruesome” aspects of the disaster.

“It was a big sensitivity issue that most media organisations faced. It is something that always arises,” he said. Also, the Andaman and Nicobar islands are sensitive areas for India, normally off-limits to mainland Indians as well as foreigners.

Prem Prakash, chairman of New Delhi-based Asian News International, said the Indian media covered the Tsunami widely. “The Indian television market is very big and coverage is very wide and there is a fiercely independent press. It created a consciousness among Indians and money poured in. India was able to manage and has been able to manage,” he said in response to a question on why India had refused so much international assistance.

Tim Arlott, business manager Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Reuters Television News, was on holiday in New Zealand when the tsunami struck. “I went straight to the nearest television screen. A New Zealand Television bulletin to its shame said: “A New Zealander is missing.”

“Our customers include organisations in Thailand, Indonesia, India, therefore we can take a regional viewpoint. People will always start with nationals of their own country and how they escaped. Good news editors are embarrassed by that. You will never get rid of the nationalism,” Arlott added.

Peter Vickers, head of content at Eurovision, Switzerland, asked if his organisation saw the tsunami too much through ‘Western eyes’, said: “Eurovision is an operational arm of the European Broadcasting Union. The perspective inevitably is European.”

As for America, session chairman Jim Laurie, a veteran foreign correspondent and a senior broadcasting consultant at the University of Hong Kong, said one US foreign editor told him: “Foreign news is like castor oil – you have to have it occasionally but it tastes horrible.” A participant quoted an unnamed American editor as saying: “Foreign news is something that happens to Americans overseas.”

Laurie said major sacrifices in coverage elsewhere are sometimes made because of a big story and other ongoing issues, such as in Sudan, are neglected.

Eurovision’s Vickers said ‘compassion fatigue’ was inevitable. “Space in a bulletin for international news of any kind, especially during a major event, is limited. Most people are looking to domestic markets, sport, economic news and so on.”

But for major media organisations such as Reuters, with bureaux in nearly every country of the world, and the BBC, there is pride in having sufficient television, text and other correspondents to cover even secondary stories during a major disaster.

Overall, Gunter Knabe, diplomatic correspondent of Germany’s Deutsche Welle TV and Radio International, said: “The tsunami increased awareness that there were other ongoing tragedies in the world… it’s a global village.”

Jim Laurie summed up by stressing the need to keep covering the consequences of such a disaster. “We must encourage our colleagues and management to focus more resources on so-called ‘Act Two’ reporting,” he said.