REPORTING DISASTER

Let me begin by saying I'm not really sure where I'm going with this so just bear with.

Like many, part of how I've been following the Sichuan quake has been through listening to NPR's All Things Considered. Several of their key staff - including two of their main co-hosts and another pair of their main producers - were all in Chengdu (Sichuan's capital) for a series of stories on "modern China." In fact, I had been asked if I wanted to contribute to any of the China coverage about a week ago. This was all before the quake hit...but when it did, NPR had some of its most experienced staff members literally at the epicenter. As a journalist, I can only imagine that such a confluence of circumstances must be both incredible and devastating.

On the one hand, they are covering the human toll of this disaster in a way that I don't think anyone could possibly envy. It's not like they went into Chengdu as war correspondents, ready for death or destruction - the Chengdu stories were meant to be human interest-related. Instead, they end up doing disaster coverage and not just any disaster, but something of a magnitude that few in the Western world (outside of the Gulf Coast, circa August 2005) could probably comprehend. Many have been and will be talking about Melissa Block's story from yesterday, where she reports on a couple in Dujiangyan suffering through an agonizing wait to find their two year old son and elderly parents buried under the rubble of their home. You can hear her breaking down at various times as she reports on what's happening.

This story must have taken hours to record and I'm trying to imagine what Block and her staff were thinking through this. Is it morally right to put a microphone on such intense suffering? What is the role of journalism in the face of this kind of personal agony?

My wife and I had the same thought, which we spoke aloud to one another: someone is probably going to earn a Pulitzer for this. And we felt ashamed for thinking it but I think we were both responding to the incredible impact of the story. I mean, this is what radio does - it dramatizes and personalizes in ways that other forms of media - not print, not even video - cannot achieve. And so, these stories, which are simultaneously horrific and incredible, raise these conflicted emotions at both the power of the reporting but also its ethical dimensions. I'm not raising this as a form of castigation; I can't say I'd be doing anything different if I were in their shoes (and I'm glad I'm not). I just don't know how to resolve that dilemma.

Last thought in this thread: the Burma cyclone disaster, in terms of death toll and general devastation, is "worse" (if you want to quantify) and it's over 10 days old yet I never got pulled into it the same way and I think part of it is because the media reports coming out of Burma lack the same kind of human dimension that's being reported on in China. It's not for lack of stories - it's lack of access. Journalists in Burma have to broadcast behind the backs of the local officials so long radio pieces are out, only cell phone reporting seems easy to do. And that difference is stark - what's happening is that two equal human dramas are playing out in real time but only one of them is getting the kind of depth and nuance it deserves. Not for lack of relevance, but lack of means.

Let me bridge me from there to something on a different note:

I firmly believe the Iraq War is the worst foreign policy decision that I've ever seen in my lifetime and frankly, there's leaders deserving of prosecution over it. That said, I'm not a hardcore anti-interventionist and as Daniel Schorr points out - it's too bad Iraq has given the idea of interventionism a bad name. With Burma, what the military government seems to be doing is beyond reprehensible. Maybe it's not as bad as gassing their own citizens, but at the very least, it's malignant neglect. Schorr suggests that, just international partners should have done in Rwanda 14 years ago (but didn't), it's time for the UN to get humanitarian aid into Burma, sovereignty be damned. Frankly, I have visions of special teams forces swooping in and abducting the entire junta leadership. Not likely to happen and I'm sure some would suggest that wouldn't be terribly constructive but seriously, when you have leadership willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of their citizens over a power grab, emotionally speaking, it's hard to get behind sanctions alone.

Of course, Burma seems a bit bush league compared to North Korea, whose domestic policies seem to be aspiring for Stalinist/Maoist levels of inflicting damage on its own citizenry. Ergo, maybe, it's not the idea of regime-change that's inherently bad...more like the choice of targets. *sigh*

--O.W.