Disaster Reported

Television is probably the worst medium to understand natural disasters, or at least the worst medium to understand natural disasters as they’re reported. The reports always focus on the most devastated areas, focusing on death and destruction, destroyed homes and businesses, downed trees and fissured earth, missing relatives and stranded puppies. Watching coverage of this week’s various fires throughout the southwest, you have to wonder if anyone west of Denver is anything other than a chunk of smoldering charcoal. Sweeping panoramas of mountains consumed in fire and smoke, subdivisions leveled to ash and rubble, leave the impression of a Smokey-the-Bear Armageddon. And the storms that went through the mid-Atlantic this past weekend apparently left millions without power, transportation, food, water, hope, or an internet connection. “No one who is within a hundred miles of me right now,” you expect to hear a reporter intoning, “can hear my voice because they don’t have access to TV or radio, poor souls. Or they just might be dead.” This video portrait of doom and destruction is painted with the fine brush of dramatic selectivity. We see reporters, ruggedly outfitted in cargo pants and t-shirts and LL Bean jackets, standing before smoldering ruins, downed trees (typically smashing roofs and/or cars), and sparking power lines, and speaking in Shakespearean verse of the utter destruction that they’re heroically witnessing.

I first noticed the media distortion of disaster years ago when a large earthquake ravaged Mexico City. The television coverage the first few days focused on the rubble and loss of life throughout the city. The impression was of total devastation, the loss of what must be most if not all of a major city. It was only a few days later that I read in Time magazine that I learned that this (admittedly) major earthquake actually destroyed only about 1% of the city’s buildings. Not an inconsequential amount, but not the total destruction one might have concluded by the television coverage.

Our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughters live in a suburb of D.C., and we were worried when we read and saw on TV that a major storm had gone through the area last Friday night, that power was out for millions of people, and that temperatures were supposed to approach 100 over the weekend. The reports we watched featured downed trees, crushing roofs and cars, snapped power lines, and snarled traffic because of no power for signals. We didn’t hear anything, and worried about their now having power or phone access. But by Sunday we were relieved to hear from them, via phone and internet, and they had only lost power for a few hours, and all was well. They hadn’t seen a reason to let us know that all was OK. Maybe they weren’t watching TV.