The news angle after disaster

BENCHWARMER

by Ramon Dacawi

                                               

(Whatever it means, the United Nations designated May 3 as World Press Freedom Day. We celebrate with a recast of a piece on responsibility in the exercise of freedom written in the wake of Typhoon Pepeng three years back.)

In a life-time of journalistic work, Charles Kuralt traveled the back roads, the rural, “blue” highways of America. He was in search of ordinary people with extraordinary deeds, their simple pleasures and aches, and toasting the beauty of nature and the countryside. He wrote of folks otherwise nameless for their ordinariness, of places so obscure they can’t be found on the map. Through the feature segment of the news telecast on CBS, he did justice to their stories. 

As his stories showed, courage, sacrifice and fortitude are never the monopoly of big names, of stars and celebrities, of world and national leaders, of usual and conventional newsmakers. He found heroism among common folk. For one, he found fulfillment recording and sharing the family story of brothers and sisters, all professionals, coming home to pay tribute to their parents who broke their backs sending each child to school.

He wrote about a Russian dentist and war veteran who sought him out to finally be able to thank, through the power of television, American soldiers who risked their lives to share food so he and his fellow Russian prisoners could survive a German concentration camp.

It’s never water under the bridge to read and re-read his accounts of these human characters and places in his books “A Life on the Road” and “On the Road with…”, copies of which are still found in our “wagwag” bookshops.

Similar stories that inspire surfacein the aftermath of a calamity, say a typhoon or a fire. Yet in the rush to meet the deadline and the element of immediacy in the news, many of these stories couldn’t be captured by reporters, however they try, in Kuralt’s words, to cover a lot of water.

Given the lack of time and space, the priority angle has to be on the number of victims, the extent of damage and loss, the cause and effect of calamity, the quotes and decisions from the top on relief and reconstruction, reminders on lessons forgotten, together with the finger-pointing that comes with the ebbing of the floods and the clearing of smoke and dust.

A reporter has to sift through the voluminous accounts and facts taken from the coverage, and pick one or two that somehow give a picture of the rest. The rest would have to be written later, or never, forgotten as the situation normalizes and other newsworthy events needed to be covered also unfold.

Within the limited givens, media, especially television, now and then depend on the amateur footages of witnesses and victims of calamities for a better picture of what happened. Sometimes, stories about heroism, selflessness and sacrifice get lost in the aftermath of calamities and in the maze of pronouncements and promises from newsmakers that we shall overcome.  

It’s responsible journalism, too,  to also focus on the humanitarian efforts of lesser mortals and groups. Their contributions  to easing human suffering are as newsworthy as those of greater mortals and agencies. The analogy lies where sacrifice lies in a plate of ham and eggs, as the late human rights lawyer and Baguio boy Art Galace once wrote: The chicken provided the egg and that’s involvement; the pig contributed the ham and that’s commitment.

It’s fulfilling enough to write about a kid skipping his or her birthday bash and giving the party fund to another kid in need , as it is to record the number of people who will join this year’s “Stand Up Against Poverty” being mounted by the United Nations. The news value of a cancer patient’s act of giving up part of her chemotherapy fund to another patient is equal to that of the donation of, say, a Bill Gates. Except for the amounts, there’s no difference in the efforts. Both acts are driven by sensitivity.

The difference lies in helping and not helping. As Mike Jacobs of the Grand Forks Herald of North Carolina noted in one of his winning editorials: We are not what we have or own. In the wake of a flood that hit his community, residents began clearing and putting order back to their town. Despite their personal losses, they tried to contribute to ease the loss of other victims.  

Just do it, then health secretary and Baguio boy Juan Flavier advised. That’s why journalists, especially those on television, do it after a calamity. They go beyond writing, shooting and broadcasting news, editorials and opinion pieces. They mount fund drives and relief operations for the victims and thousands respond to their call, underscoring the power of media.

The angle in relief operations, however, needs to be refocused more on the donors rather than on the conduits. This is specially so in television where the reporters tend to project themselves and their outfits  as central to the relief, while hardly mentioning  the Samaritan who are the source of the relief for the calamity victims.

Kuralt was right about the limitations of reporters: “The reporter is a stone skipping on a pond, taking an instant to tell a story and ricocheting to the next, covering a lot of water while only skimming the surface.”

Still, the element of immediacy in news and the freedom of the press, of expression, don’t give us the excuse to project the self-serving impression that the messenger is the message. (e-mail: mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments).