New York Times
Dec 28 2004
Broadcasters Struggle to Make Sense of a Disaster
By DAVID CARR
Published: December 28, 2004
An earthquake that sent walls of water tumbling inland through South
and Southeast Asia left television news networks sifting through
thousands of images sent from around the region as they struggled to
make sense of the largest earthquake in 40 years.
The massive scope of the disaster touched on more than six different
countries, many of which have the kind of technological
infrastructure that allowed vivid imagery to be transmitted before
the dimensions of the disaster were actually known.
Video compression technology, fed by digital cameras and enabled by
satellite and videophones, along with laptops with uplink
capabilities, meant that people all over the world saw the deadly
aftermath of the earthquake just hours after it ended. And by
yesterday morning, real-time video footage of the tidal wave striking
the shores, much of it taken by tourists on or near the beaches in
Thailand began showing up on network broadcasts.
Because of the ubiquity of the footage, there was little competition
for good pictures, with the television operations of both Reuters and
The Associated Press finding themselves awash in video feeds from the
region.
“Like many natural disasters, there was not anything live actually to
begin with,” said Sandy MacIntyre, director of news at APTN, the
video arm of The Associated Press in London. “But now, a day after,
some of the most vivid images, the ones of the waves hitting the
beaches, were filmed by the people most affected.”
Still, Mr. MacIntyre said, “this has been one of the most
geographically and logistically challenging stories to cover in a
generation because of the sheer scale of it.” He added, “When I was
woken and told of what happened, I got the atlas open and I looked at
the mass of the Indian Ocean rim and realized what a big story we
were looking at.”
Robert Muir, the acting news editor of Reuters Television in
Washington, said there had been no scarcity of video imagery. “It is
not as if there was a single plane crash where someone had exclusive
footage,” he said. “This was happening many places at once, and we
found many people who were willing to part with video just so the
story could be told.”
It is a far cry from the 1988 earthquake in northern Armenia where
tens of thousands of people also died; it took more than two days for
images of the devastation to emerge.
Bill Wheatley, vice president of NBC News, said that at that time the
network had to charter a 300-seat Soviet aircraft because it was the
only one available to get images of the Armenian disaster back to
Moscow so they could be transmitted.
“It’s amazing how much things have changed,” he said. “We now have
the ability to feed our pictures from virtually anywhere. In fact,
the ability to feed pictures sometimes outpaces the ability to get
extensive editorial information to go with them, although in the
instance of this story, the pictures almost speak for themselves.”
Yesterday the airwaves were full of pictures of the aftermath, but
stringers in the area are now finding bystanders who shot video of
the disaster and lived to tell the tale.
“We knew right away that we needed to get to the beaches of Thailand
because that’s where the tourists were,” said Chuck Lustig, director
of foreign news for ABC, who immediately dispatched the network’s
Hong Kong correspondent to the Thailand.
John Paxson, London bureau chief of CBS News, sent two crews, one
from Beijing and one from Tokyo, as soon as he got word of the
disaster.
“One of our producers sat down and began looking at the many, many
images from so many different places and said, ‘I don’t know where to
start,’ ” Mr. Paxson said. “This isn’t a race for pictures, this is
an attempt to tell a massive story.”
As recently as 1998, when there was a huge tsunami that landed on the
coast of Papua New Guinea, the networks found themselves scrambling
to get pictures out of the disaster area, in part because the wave
landed in a technologically underdeveloped place.
“We didn’t get pictures from that until days later, because it was
such a primitive area,” said David Rhodes, director of news gathering
at Fox News in New York. “This has been nothing like that. There is a
lot to work with and a lot to try and make sense of.”
Bob Calo, an associate professor at the graduate school of journalism
at the University of California, Berkeley, said that there had been
something of a reversal in the news-gathering process. “If you think
back, news gatherers would get the story and then commission a
photographer to go and get the pictures,” he said. “Now we have
flipped it around to where reporters are chasing the pictures, trying
to create some context for what viewers are seeing.”
Mr. Paxson of CBS said that it was axiomatic that most of the
coverage was coming from areas that had been hit the least hard.
“The story now moves to what happened in places that are more remote
and less connected, places like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands,” he
said. “No one really knows what we are going to find out there.”