JOURNALISTS WITNESSING DISASTER

Abstract

This article explores how journalist witnessing in the context of disaster reporting can both sustain as well as distance cosmopolitan views and outlooks. Attending to the professional accounts and testimonies of TV news correspondents and reporters involved in recent disaster reporting, a more complex picture emerges than hitherto of competing journalist practices, professional commitments and personal emotional investments. Journalists today often reproduce recognizable forms of disaster reporting that conform, following their own accounts, to a narrowly conceived, geo-politically informed and essentially amoral journalistic outlook—an entrenched “calculus of death” rooted in a particularistic national prism and inimical to cosmopolitan ideas and sentiments. But so also do their accounts and practices sometimes speak to a more expansive, universally inflected and morally infused journalist form of witnessing. Here journalists purposefully craft and inscribe their news reports with a thinly veiled but transparent “injunction to care”. This article addresses this seeming antinomy in the contemporary world of disaster reporting and considers how journalist practices may now be contributing to wider cultural currents of cosmopolitanism.

Keywords:

• beneficent embedding
• calculus of death
• cosmopolitanism
• injunction to care
• journalist practices

Notes

1. Which is not to suggest that the cosmopolitan, as with the global and the transnational, need always be taken in opposition to the regional, national and local, but can sometimes be performed and represented in and through them (Beck 2006; Berglez 2008; Kyriakidou 2008, 2009; Cottle and Lester 2011).

2. This article draws on and develops the author's “Producing News: Witnessing Disasters”, Chapter 5, in Disasters and the Media, by Mervi Pantti, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Simon Cottle (2012). I would like to thank the publisher, Peter Lang, for permission to reuse some of this material here and also Lilie Chouliaraki for her insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.

3. This article is based on one or more interviews with each of the following news producers, correspondents and reporters: Jane Deith, Channel Four reporter; Deb Evans, BBC news editor; Andy Gallagher, BBC—North America correspondent; Chris Hogg, BBC—Shanghai correspondent; Robert Nisbet, Sky—US correspondent; and Sally Reardon, APTN editor. Interviews were conducted between February and April 2011 via Skype, telephone, in person and email. Between them the interviewees have variously worked for all major broadcast news organizations based in the United Kingdom, including APTN, the BBC, Channel 4, ITN and Sky, and have covered most of the major disasters reported in recent years. I would like to sincerely thank all the above for their time and insights generously offered.

4. See http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/haiti-the-toughest-most-harrowing-assignment/7620.