Japan disaster shows U.S. journalists unprepared
Tim Goodman
Friday, March 18, 2011
snip...
Unfortunately, cable news in this country is just as lazy. Because if any institution needs to get back to basics and refocus on what it takes to survive a disaster - or report on it with integrity - it's the cable news business. The triple threat in Japan - earthquake, tsunami, nuclear reactors in peril - is clearly demonstrating how reporters and anchors are bungling the basics and how the producers and executives in charge of them have fallen woefully short of leadership. How is it possible that on Monday evening (Tuesday in Japan), with the earthquake, tsunami and worries about radiation poisoning engulfing Japan, a CNN reporter can ask this question: "How scary has this been for you?"
Let's see, my daughter was ripped from my arms in the tsunami, I almost died, I lost my home, my belongings, family, friends. There are constant aftershocks, new tsunami warnings and apparently we're about to have a nuclear meltdown. I don't know, dumbass, how scary does that sound to you?
Remarkably, among American outlets, CNN has been doing better work than its competitors. It makes you shudder (or should). For example, MSNBC seems adrift, and every time it comes back to Chris Matthews and his talk-yelling at people on the set. Fox doesn't have the reporting strength that CNN does, and CNBC appears more concerned about the Nikkei than the people of Japan.
The best coverage - by far - is being done online by the likes of Japanese network NHK English, the BBC and Al Jazeera English. Deeper content is, of course, available from print outlets like the New York Times and such, but all natural disasters and wars are visual stories benefiting from moving pictures. And so CNN often becomes the default channel - so its faults, noted here, should then be applied on down to the line to those TV news outlets in this country that fall below CNN (not in ratings, naturally, but quality content).
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/17/DDFN1ICTA0.DTL#ixzz1GxxyZrkdThese are currently the top 3 responses to the article.
Keep in mind that General Electric, the company that designed the reactors, owns NBC. You can forget any real reporting from them.
One frustration with all news channels is their adoption of the quick cut/MTv style of presentation. Watching some of the tsunami videos on YouTube is heartbreaking; the water keeps rising, inexorably, for minutes on end. No cover commentary needed, no flashy graphics - it's incredibly moving *and* incredibly informative. But when the same videos air on TV, you get at most 15 or 20 seconds, framed with nested graphics and scrolling headlines, and with insipid commentator voiceovers. In short, it was pointless to try to grasp this disaster by watching TV.
John hits in on the head in this column; the Piers Morgan interview of Yoko was when I finally gave up and turned off the TV. And adding to the faults you describe, Faux News is using this tragedy as a vehicle to further its agenda - for the first two days of the nuclear crisis, they were interviewing "experts" from the Heritage Foundation and "The Heartland Institute" (whatever that is - and since when did either of these groups concentrate on nuclear engineering safety??) - with these "experts" downplaying any risks and claiming that "other news channels" were blowing things out of proportion. It was about 4 hours later that the first reactor building blew up; only then did Fox start realizing this is a real event and not just another chance for political theater.
Pretty much, except for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. She has interviewed nuclear experts at length and presented a calmer take in general of the whole catastrophe. Yoko Ono?? Really??? 
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