Why News Hounds Should Back off

On the news stupid journalists asked people freed from death's clutches "how they were feeling" and seemed more interested in having an accurate body count than sensitively and respectfully telling the stories of those affected by what may well be New Zealand's darkest and most destructive minute.… New Zealand, we need you to have our back on this one. We don't need insensitive journalism and voyeuristic pictures of our dead.

At times like this, it is important that stories like these are told, whether by journalists or others. They are about so much more than voyeurism. They help remind us of our common humanity, and to give the rest of us some small inkling of what traumas like these mean for those affected.

was fairly disgusted with the pathetic attempts of The Age and HS to milk the very worst out of the disaster, particularly with the pictures of the Manning family grieving immediately after finding out their mother was dead. Why do people think this is acceptable imagery to splash on the front page? It gave the public absolutely no information and was just sordid sensationalism. And I don't think the Mannings will appreciate knowing that the image of their grief has now been posted thousands of times on the internet, that lock-box of regrettably revealed digital information.

Pathetic effort on the part of the mainstream media outlets to get the most morbid photos they could and the most disastrous headlines they could manage. How about more actual reporting?

When news hounds should back off

March 10th, 2011 | Add a Comment

One story has cropped up more than any other since the beginning of journalism – the behaviour of journalists.

Even when reporters try to stay in the background and not become part of the story, eventually the spotlight is turned back on them and in its glare they are often accused of being rude, insensitive, aggressive, self-centred, arrogant, incompetent or demanding.

Everyone's work can be judged by the way is done rather than the outcome that is achieved – performers are perhaps the most extreme example – and almost all workers, tradespeople and professionals face criticism some time or another. But very few professions suffer as much opprobrium for so little praise as do journalists.

Surveys in Western democracies consistently show that journalists feature at the bottom of most professions measured against indices such as trustworthiness. We are often only slightly above criminals and used car salesman. In the annual Ipsos MORI survey of trustworthy professions in Britain, journalists have taken bottom spot for most of the past 27 years. A poll by Roy Morgan found fewer than one in five Australians found TV reporters ethical and honest while only one in ten trusted newspaper journalists.

A low opinion from our fellow citizens seems to come with the job, and nowhere is it more obvious than in the wake of media coverage of natural disasters.

The Australasian region has had enough of these recently for the behaviour of journalists to emerge as a common theme. From floods in Queensland and Victoria, bushfires in Western Australia and cyclones in Fiji and northern Australia to the recent devastating earthquake in New Zealand, critics have been out in force condemning the boorish antics of journalists – especially television reporters and news photographers – and their coverage of events in the media.

Disaster porn

It has been labelled – rightly or wrongly – disaster porn and recent public concern in Australasia reached a peak with the Christchurch earthquake. Few sectors of the media have been spared.

Whether it was camera crews chasing exhausted rescuers across rubble or newspapers emblazoning across their pages a photograph of a man and his two children in utter despair over the death of their mother, journalists were seen to have hit a new low in their behaviour.

ABC TV's Media Watch program devoted several minutes to charges that Channel Seven used deceit to interview a traumatised survivor in her hospital bed and that Australian television networks repeatedly used footage of a woman being carried from the rubble despite her pleading with the camera operator shooting the initial live footage to "Go away!" Presenter Jonathan Holmes said: "Despite her plainly expressed reluctance to be filmed, that was one of the shots used again and again on Australian TV for days in news stories, in promos and just as a kind of wallpaper until the human anguish they represented became dulled by repetition." [The image here from Media Watch has been masked by DogBitesMan.]

Of course, disasters bring out the best and the worst in many people,