Media must not allow ‘compassion fatigue’ to set in with tsunami tragedy

TWO columnists on this page recently went into the business of prophecy. One was Pat Brosnan, who attacked the initially proposed Government aid for tsunami victims as ‘paltry’, ‘risible’ and ‘peanuts’ and added the prophecy that by the time readers would see his column in the newspaper, the Government might have increased the sum offered.

In fact, Government re-consideration took longer than overnight, but the move from €2 million to €10m did come within days. The other prophecy related to the tsunami came from Noel Whelan.

"The sad reality," he wrote, "is that what is disturbingly described as 'disaster fatigue' will soon kick in. Our news bulletins will be dominated instead by more proximate and localised concerns. The reality of the unequal world which humankind has

created is that we in the west will move on and South East Asia's poor will be left to deal with the long-term problems caused by this disaster on their own."

Whelan was rapidly proven right. In the last week of 2004, people who had never heard of the concept of a tsunami were talking about it with a fear-struck familiarity. However, by the end of the first week of 2005, it had slipped from first place in the news line-up. It might be the greatest natural disaster in modern times, with a

final death toll likely to be close to a quarter of a million people, but it still became less important depending on your choice of media than Hugh Orde's

belief the IRA did the bank job, Colin Farrell's participation in the movie turkey of the decade or the marital split between Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt.

Well, that's the way of the world, I hear you say. Doesn't the urgent always take over from the important?

Even before this disaster, Milan Kundera had advanced a theory that the world can cope with only one crisis at a time.

In his "Book of Laughter and Forgetting" Kundera gave examples.

"The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai and so on and so forth, until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten."

The notion of humans as incapable of attending to two crises simultaneously is challenged by the fact that most people, in the course of their lives, do just that, domestically and personally.

What is inarguable, though, is that the formulaic coverage of disasters by media contributes to the shortening of the international attention span and the resultant forgetfulness.

Coverage of all disasters tends to follow a visual formula. First is the physical: pictures of trees bending in the wind or a wall of water approaching.

Then, there's the graphic: maps of the stricken area. Third is pictures of the dead, either tossed by the event in open country or lined up, wrapped, on the floor of a school or other public building for identification.

The same day the pictures of the dead arrive, we see shots of mothers, hands to their faces, weeping, and close-ups of wide-eyed orphans.

After that come pictures of the rescuers and of the food packages.

The photographs have an odd sameness to them, no matter what the disaster.

A sameness best exemplified by a picture which appeared four days ago. It showed an Australian doctor, close to the camera, talking to another relief worker.

Framed between them, but diminished by distance and demeaned by the doctor's "Him, over there" gesture, was the Indonesian man the doctor was saying would have to have his leg amputated.

The man looked terrified, but by virtue of his position in the photograph not IMPORTANT.

He was just the visual props supporting the illustrated story of (our) heroic doctors making tough decisions (for them).

It was ever thus. In disaster coverage, Europeans and Americans tend to be photographed as individuals. Up close.

Identifiable. Non-white peoples tend to be robbed of their individuality. They are photographed in large groups. Middle distance. Less identifiable, more easily stereotyped: peasant grandmother rends garments, hysterical over death of children and grandchildren.

The stories, too, follow a pattern. First comes horror and scale. Next, concern about Irish people who may be in the location, which is common to all nations.

Third comes coverage of our willingness to help, whether as individuals or as countries.

After that comes blame. Blame is a broad-spectrum weapon. You can aim it at the victims themselves (why the hell didn't they have an early warning system or a way to be contactable by others?).

You can aim it at the donors this country or that country didn't give enough, or Cherie Blair shouldn't have made a photo opportunity out of donating Leo's cast-off toys.

You can aim it at the aid agencies, asking how little of the money donated will actually reach the victims, how many of the thousands of 'charities' seeking funds for victims are bogus, or how big a portion of the money needed for third world development will be diverted to the disaster, leaving the poor unhelped in other locations.

What usually rounds off the story of a natural disaster, as far as Western media are concerned, is the announcement that camps have been set up for those displaced.

This tends to be presented as a solution, allowing readers to make the inference that at least survivors are going to be fed and medically treated and in no time will be back in their homes.

This self-comforting interpretation has little to justify it. For starters, the length of time disaster victims spend in refugee camps is never predictable.

The refugees in these camps face an indeterminate sentence of imprisonment.

The indeterminacy of the sentence is the killer, as Rudolf Höss observed as an SS officer in Dachau.

"The uncertainty of the duration of their imprisonment was something with which they could never come to terms," he noted. "It was this that wore them down and broke even the most steadfast will Because of that alone their life in camp was a torment."

Despite all that, once the tsunami story reaches the refugee camp stage, mass media will lose interest in it. It's too far away. Too hard to find new angles.

Mass media is good at notification, but rotten at retaining interest.

"But by such behaviour," says Professor Susan Moeller, director of the journalism programme at Brandeis University in the US, "media abdicate responsibility in the forum where they are privileged with the greatest access and the most information.

"They could, they should arrest the decline in both media coverage and audience interest ... Compassion fatigue, and even more clearly, compassion avoidance are signals that the coverage of international affairs must change."