THE NUMBERS GAME: DEATH, MEDIA, AND PUBLIC EMOTION
Jean Seaton

Open Democracy, UK
Oct 6 2005

When media report wars or disasters, why are death tolls announced
before bodies are counted? And what does this do to our democracy?

Jean Seaton dissects the numbers game.

As hurricanes Katrina and Rita retreat and some ordering of the
after-effects takes place, the magnitude of what has happened is
still unfolding. The role of the reporting of the tragedies is also
being scrutinised.

There are the blistering issues of inequality, and the ways in
which our modern – indisputably man-encouraged catastrophes – have
indisputably man-made effects. Hurricanes, just like famines, produce
precise maps of disadvantage, which shockingly make public all kinds
of usually hidden discrimination.

There is the role of the media in Katrina first in telling us that
the hurricane “was not as bad as expected” when the water was surging
into New Orleans, and then at least why some outlets told us that
while white people “foraged”, black people “looted”.

There is also the more subtle problem of audiences’ sometimes casual
disinterest in any group that looks like a victim. Surely, one reason
people used their mobiles so effectively to take images in the July
2005 bombings in London was that to report on an event (which is what
everyone now knows how to do) meant that by they regained some control
over them: they stopped being merely victims. There is a chilling
audience response to simultaneously feel close to disasters because
now they can be seen – yet because they are watched on a screen to feel
distanced, because they are part of the ongoing litany of disasters.

Reported but uncounted

However, lying around the soggy remains of the cities that have been
devastated are the wrecks of discarded statistics. Were there 20,000
people in the New Orleans Superbowl or 5,000? How many people were
shot: four or 120? How many died in the hospitals – despite heroic
medical efforts – simply because there was no power and no water: 300
or 600? Did most people escape or not? How long is a traffic jam with
500,000 people in it? Can you really evacuate 2 million people? Why at
first was it reported that 10,000 people had died when the final death
toll seems to have been around 800? If most people escaped was it a
success rather than a failure? And, more provocatively, was the death
count the only – or indeed the most important – thing in the story?

So far, at least, the mortality figures have all been steadily
coming down from huge estimates and will now slowly creep up – but
not by large numbers. Unlike the Asian tsunami the death toll will
not become unimaginably high. But how do we get our minds around the
order of magnitude the disaster represents? Is it less of a story if
fewer people died?

There are many reasons for the numbers changing – not least that
nobody had the slightest idea of how to begin to estimate the impact
of the catastrophe, they had only their eyes, not, as it turns
out, necessarily reliable. It was chaos, and critically for modern
eyes it looked on television screens like foreign, other, biblical
Armageddon. Actually what looking at it reminded me of was one of
JG Ballard’s early science fiction worlds in which some quality of
civilised life is withdrawn, no power and too much water, and the
veneer of propriety is stripped away from everybody. A very large
disaster must, the scenes implied, have killed a very large number
of people.

But it is also part of such disasters as the New Orleans flood that
the impact was both unparalleled and patchy. If you were at the
heart of the storm everything went, but ten miles away things were
untouched. By a fluke of wind or place, a house or an office might
survive. Your house might fall down but you might have survived,
as many did. Many more escaped than seems likely. Sorting out real
numbers is hard to do in such circumstances.

Another source of wrong numbers were the disaster plans that did
exist. Journalists, hunting for “facts” recycled the numbers
of casualties that plans had estimated might result from such
a catastrophe, and used them as if they were descriptions of the
event that had just occurred – rather than bureaucratic responses to
imagined future ones. As it turned out 20,000 body-bags did not mean
20,000 dead.

Then there is the problem of the relationship between physical
destruction, buildings, houses, streets, things – all of the weighty
material of American civilisation dissipated, gone (not unlike 9/11).

If so much stuff had been destroyed then surely, it seemed, so
must have very many people? Needless to say, it was very difficult
to get reliable information and people intent on saving others may
understandably not make counting a priority. There are lots of good
reasons why counting was insecure. Nevertheless, my brother, one of
the British diplomats much maligned in the country’s tabloid press,
sent a team from Chicago in search of British citizens to care for
and had a remarkably accurate estimate of the casualty figures by
the third day – just as the media figures started to escalate. Why
didn’t the media ask people who knew?

Katrina may well go on claiming lives in unexpected ways, and these
will neither be reported nor counted. A law student friend of my
son had been working in New Orleans on Clive Stafford Smith’s legal
programme to investigate possible cases of wrongful conviction and
thus save prisoners from execution. Having managed to commandeer a
car she was penned in a thirteen-hour traffic jam leaving the city
as the wind blew up, while the police threatened with guns anyone
trying to use the other side of the motorway.

Although she managed to escape from the city, what did not escape was
the painstakingly collected trial evidence and witness interviews,
the years of patient work put in against a hostile judicial system
to free many who had been inadequately represented and whose lives
depended on files and computer records now lost for ever in the
flood. So there are victims still to come.

Think of a number, then use it

Nevertheless, the main reason for the volatility of the original
casualty count had at least something to do with audiences and
journalism as well as practical reality. Mortality figures establish
the claims of an event on our attention. A journalist who missed much
of the story because she was in a remote part of Afghanistan when it
happened observed that it was very odd being so out of touch. But,
she added: “It was the 10,000 figure that had us all jumping about
paying attention when someone got a text message – before that we had
thought, oh yes all of New Orleans flooded, not so important.” The
body-count changed what it meant. So numbers have to be big enough
to catch the eye.

Indeed, not is quite all that it seems on the numbers front.

Mortality and casualty figures have their own life and it is quite
often rather independent from that of the events they describe. Thus
“10,000” dead has a long history. It means something like “an awful
lot”. The original campaigning press reporting of the “the Bulgarian
atrocities” in 1876 had three numbers that reoccur: 30,000 dead, our
good friend 10,000 dead and a local massacre with some more precise
and smaller number, “123” or “over 40 women and children”.

Interestingly, 10,000 in the late 19th century meant that the
inhabitants of a town had been killed; it is – one might say – an
urban sort of number. These figures re-emerged in subsequent late
19th- and early 20th-century Balkan conflicts. It would have been
difficult to get accurate figures so the first modern campaigning
foreign reporters did what they could, and pitched in numbers that
would impress the readers back home – “10,000” dead has popped up in
urban conflicts and disasters ever since.

Another mythic number was the “700,000” Jews it was claimed had been
murdered by the Nazis in 1933. Actually, the figure seems at first
to have been derived from an estimate of the numbers of Armenians
massacred during the first world war. It was a figure that resonated,
and it was repeated in all of the major anti-fascist rallies in
Britain during the 1930s: Hugh Dalton, the Labour politician and
prominent anti-appeaser used it, the Archbishop of Canterbury used it,
the Jewish Chronicle used it, the Chief Rabbi used it, it appears in
Fabian pamphlets and Board of Deputies of British Jews’ reports.

It seemed an appallingly large number, and was used in speeches,
reported in newspapers and then, authenticated by the Times and the
Telegraph, recycled by politicians and campaigners. It was still being
used in 1942. In 1933 it was an overestimate and of course by 1942 it
was a tragically misleading underestimate, but it was a number people
repeated to each other – in circumstances when precise counting was
in any case impossible. The number, in a way, did its work, something
very large and evil was happening, but later it obscured reality and
was rendered meaningless by repetition.

The need for context

The temptation to journalists to jump on large numbers is
understandable – after all they want us to attend, and they want to
get their story a place in the news. Indeed, in any real and large
event there is so much panic and disorder, who is to know how many
have died with any accuracy?

Then there are all the familiar issues about the emotional geography
of casualties. We bother more about people we feel close to, and a few
casualties in one place get more attention than many casualties in a
place (even if it is just down the road in fact) that we do not feel
linked to. There is a media equation that produces – out of distance,
number and news value – a place for any set of numbers in the story
hierarchy.

This is one reason why stories need “faces”, identifiable individuals
whose predicament mediates the experience more tellingly to
audiences. This mechanism concentrates on the human similarity of
another victim and may help us understand the plight of the many
suffering or in danger. Sometimes, of course, this has distorting
side-effects. Our preference for saving known victims rather than
the “statistical” victims of large numbers of casualties can lead to
some strange outcomes. We will the means to save one sick child (or in
Britain on occasions the one trapped dog), at the expense of delivering
the most sensible relief to many. Nevertheless, the mechanism is a
way of helping us understand the experience behind numbers.

Another aspect of media numbers is that they play into what audiences
can imagine. And this may be another problem. There is a wonderful,
empowering moment in children’s lives when they first count to 1,000.

It takes a rather satisfyingly long time, and in my experience is
usually accomplished in the back of a car on a lengthy journey to a
holiday. But it gives the 7-year-old a feeling for the dimensions of
the number. I wonder what feeling for big numbers we usually have?

Antony Gormley, the British sculptor, has a marvellous work The Field,
which includes models, made by community groups of small, clay,
humanoid figures which he then crowds into a space: there are 4,000
of them. It looks both incalculable and human. It makes one take on
the individuality of each figure and the size of the community. It
is a lesson in size. So what we need is some imaginative thinking
about how to explain the numbers of casualties to us, some way of
representing the human dimensions of tragedies in ways we can work
with. Then, perhaps, the figures would be less mythic and more real,
and the soggy numbers floating around New Orleans could settle down
and do their work more accurately.

But what we needed perhaps during hurricane Katrina at least as much
as a reliable estimate of the dimensions of the disaster in human
fatalities, was more explanation of what it meant. What is the role
of New Orleans in America? It is not just a pretty place but a vital
industrial port. Where have all the people gone and how are they
coping? Could we deal with millions of displaced people? It is not
merely a “natural” disaster but a huge social, cultural and economic
one. In order to comprehend what it means we need to know a good deal
more than the fleeting, attention-grabbing horror of the numbers game.

Jean Seaton is professor of media studies at Westminster University.

She is co-author (with James Curran) of Power Without Responsibility:
The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (5th edition, 1997) and official
historian of the BBC. Her most recent book is Carnage and the Media:
The Making and Breaking of News about Violence (Penguin 2005)