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Disasters and the Media Jeremy Toye For the media, a disaster is not a tragedy. It is a challenge, an opportunity. A challenge for the traditional media to find out what is happening, how to get there, what is at stake, who is to blame. For the nontraditional media, the tweeters, Facebook friends, and bloggers, it is how to get the message out, who to include, when to retweet someone else’s tweet. And for all of them, there is the chance to inform, to activate, or to enrage, for a vast audience always turns to the media whenever a disaster strikes. Those are some of the challenges, but there are opportunities too. It is not necessarily wrong, nor even cynical, for a decent journalist to see a disaster as an opportunity to get a good story. Journalists wept at the site of the Twin Towers falling. But they and their employers had a job to do, and in a disaster, no matter whether it is “natural” or “man-made,” it gets harder but potentially more rewarding . And most media outlets will claim that they are there to serve noble ideals, that challenging authority and revealing the facts will lead to change for the better. For the owners of commercial media, there is not only an opportunity to show expertise and concern for suffering but also a chance to revive flagging circulations and audiences.1 In that large slice of the world where the state controls the media, it is a chance to show that government can move fast and help—unless, of course, it is the regime itself which is to blame for the disaster. For those among the millions of social media users who want to go beyond their circle of friends and what they had for breakfast, disasters spell a chance to get help, to rally support, or to let their compassion or concern show through. The media have traditionally been reactive to disaster. It has happened, so now let us surf the feelings of revulsion and compassion and maybe someone will do something about it. But the explosion of digital connectivity via instant satellite links, social media, and above all the cell phone is leading some to question whether the media should do something more about disasters before they happen: to educate , teach, and inform people in areas vulnerable to drought, famine, or flood; to build, plant, save water, stock grain, or practice first aid. While more traditional 255 CH20_2012_016_FUP_Cahill_p255-269.indd 255 CH20_2012_016_FUP_Cahill_p255-269.indd 255 2/13/13 11:02 PM 2/13/13 11:02 PM JEREMY TOYE 256 media may argue that their role is to present the facts and let others decide, social media opens the door for communities of all stripes to take charge of their destiny. It is left to the readers, listeners, and viewers who turn to the media, particularly in times of disaster, to distinguish reality from rumor, fact from fiction, promotion from propaganda. In the middle of all this cacophony sits a wide variety of enterprises lumped together as “the Media” (often friends, sometimes foes) and the “aid professionals,” whose role is not only to find out what is going on in what they may call a disaster-related scenario, but also to do something about it. Media and Disasters Disasters have always been part of the media’s staple diet, but in early times the dish was eaten cold. After the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, before anyone had time to react, the elegant city of Pompeii was preserved in ash.2 By the time of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the invention and rapid expansion of the telegraph system meant the news spread across the United States in minutes.3 Two world wars tested first print, then broadcast journalism (and the extent that censorship would be tolerated), while advocates for change used media to move into the public glare. The suffragettes battling for votes for women, who chained themselves to London railings, calculated well that their photos would be used around the world.4 The Ethiopian famine of 1983–845 was a milestone in putting a remote human disaster into the living rooms of what used to be called the first world. But even in the world’s first TV war in Vietnam,6 instant communication to the public, and therefore instant reaction, was rare because of limited technology and high expense. And there was still time for judicious editing along...

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