Media is adept at turning disaster mill

Irrespective of the nature of the disaster, media has templates to wring the most coverage from them, writes Jack Shafer

Natural disasters, airline crashes — and yes, terrorist bombs — undercut the normalcy of everyday life by bringing death’s whammy to an unexpected place at an unforeseen time.

In the hours and days following such catastrophes, journalists work to restore normalcy to the panicked population by explaining how and why the bad thing happened and how to prevent it from happening again.

Reporters have been normalising the abnormal for so long that they’ve created well-worn catastrophe templates to convey their stories. While covering the Boston Marathon bombing, journalists have leaned hard again on those templates.

First came the sputtering dispatches over radio and television about the calamity. Next up were the on-the- scene broadcast reports, frequently marred by confusion and contradiction, as the press held out hope for survivors but prepared audiences for the worst.

Video of the catastrophe was converted by the cable news networks into a perpetual loop, giving the talking heads a background to talk over (and giving viewers just tuning in something graphic to watch).

Then came the eyewitness accounts, telling of a big bang and the second big bang, testimony that transported more emotion than data. Not that that’s a bad thing: Since the first storytellers competed around the fire, emotion has coexisted with data in the service of narrative.

Nobody wants a story composed exclusively of numbers or of feelings. Then came additional video and photos, early body count estimates, speculation, and the refinement of facts mined and edited through the early evening and into the night.

The template for reporting on the bombing belongs to newsrooms located in the latitudes where hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods abound. As long as there have been natural disasters and the occasional train wreck or burst dam burst to cover, newsroom assignment desks have excelled at breaking mass human tragedy into its component parts and applying the principles of the division of labour to the work.

The dead and injured are treated as a medical story — reporters are sent to hospitals to tabulate the number of casualties; cases of mistaken identity are solved, often to much horror; editors send journalists to city hall and the cop shops to report the government response; profile writers are assigned to write pieces about the victims, the survivors and their families; reporters find the technical experts who can explain the science behind the disaster; and because every tragedy has an antecedent, somebody gets to excavate old clips and distill a history lesson from them.

Only slight modifications to the traditional disaster templates have been necessary to cover modern horrors where the primary perpetrators are human killers, not low-pressure weather systems or fractured hydraulic systems.

Blood-red pavement no longer denotes an accident scene or a disaster area — it’s now a crime scene that must be quarantined and studied for clues. And instead of phoning meteorologists or geologists for explanation, the press calls on new sources to fill the “expert” modules in their stories: Munitions specialists explain how pressure-cooker bombs are made; scientists demonstrate how spores are aerosolised; criminologists describe how surveillance recordings are distilled for evidence; and forensic experts delineate how they uncover a bomb-maker’s signature.

Pressing this template over a terrorist act helps journalists report the news quickly, but it also produces a sameness of coverage.

Writing in The Washington Post after the man-made disaster of the Aurora, Colorado, theatre shootings, Monica Hesse charted the routinisation of coverage: Newscasters desperate to be first end up correcting their own early goofs on air; the perpetrator’s Facebook page is uncovered and it chills us; the president makes a statement and so does the loyal opposition; we promise to “hold our children closer tonight”; heroes emerge; and journalists cover the funerals. It’s a cake that almost bakes itself.

Thanks to social media, the cake is starting to come in new flavours. Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and Flickr all acquitted themselves as news collection mediums since Monday, with both professional and amateur journalists creating and sharing unfiltered news in real time.

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare — which offers a location information app — live-Tweeted from the bombing, while Boston-based journalist Seth Mnookin fed a real- time transcript of police scanner news into his Twitter account.

Social media gathered so much rich material that even the big media boys and girls at PBS, ABC News, People (what celebrities are Tweeting!) and other outlets aggregated their content. And finally, The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple christened Twitter journalism’s electronic ombudsman for its role in refuting faulty reports and for reminding people not to believe everything they heard or read.

The disaster reporting template isn’t discarded after the cause of the disaster is discovered or people start forgetting about the tragedy. As you read this, the keepers of the template are already modifying it to capture the ongoing terror narrative. Where next will the bomber — or those inspired by him — strike?