Tsunami blitzes crisis coverage

The Boxing Day tsunami generated more media attention in the six weeks after the event than all of the world's top 10 "forgotten" emergencies did for an entire year..

There were almost 35,000 reports on the tsunami to the end of February, compared with 33,620 for the top 10 emergencies during the past year, according to research by Reuters.

The next disaster to receive the most exposure was the conflict in Sudan, where 2 million people were displaced, which attracted only 7661 media reports for the year - one-fifth of the coverage devoted to the tsunami in the first few months of 2005.

Infectious diseases such as malaria, which kills one child in Africa every 30 seconds and claims more than 1 million lives every year, received 924 mentions in the press.

The research is based on analysis of more than 200 English language newspapers across the world and was commissioned by AlertNet, part of the Reuters Foundation, the non-profit arm of the news agency, and published last week.

AlertNet says the blanket coverage of the tsunami, in which almost 300,000 people died, meant other crises and disasters were squeezed out of the media. In a separate poll, more than 100 relief experts and other leaders were asked what they thought were the most pressing emergencies that warranted global media attention.

The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an estimated 3million to 5 million people have died, mostly due to disease and malnutrition, topped the list of the most neglected hot spots.

Next was the insurgency in Uganda (30,000 children abducted and forced to serve as soldiers or sex slaves), followed by the Sudan conflict; the AIDS-HIV pandemic (30per cent of adults in southern Africa are infected and 14 million children have been orphaned); the West Africa conflict (half of Sierra Leone's 5million population is displaced); the conflicts in Colombia and Chechnya; the crises in Haiti and Nepal; and infectious disease such as malaria, tuberculosis and dengue fever.

The unprecedented blanket coverage of the tsunami disaster is highlighted by the Reuters data (see graphic). The press in South Asia gave a great deal of space to the tragedy, as did Australian newspapers, many of which carried more reports than those in the key countries affected, as did Britain's The Times and The Guardian.

The scale of the devastation and the resources required to cover the event have focused efforts on how to better prepare journalists and crews for reporting in disaster zones, as well as how best to cover the subsequent reconstruction and the distribution of aid money.

The world's media is in the process of exploring the lessons learned, with several post-tsunami conferences in the coming weeks.

In what amounts to a global debriefing, the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington in Seattle is holding a conference on April 15. Speakers include Nurdin Hasan, political editor of the newspaper Serambi Indonesia in Banda Aceh, where 70 media workers are presumed dead, including 51 of the newspaper's 193 staff members. BBC and CNN executives Sarah Ward-Lilley and Chris Cramer.

The Australian's Bangkok-based Kimina Lyall will also speak at the conference. Lyall had gone to her holiday house on an isolated Thai island north of Phuket for the weekend when the tsunami hit and witnessed friends being washed out to sea. In extremely difficult circumstances, she then filed that day and continued coverage over the following weeks.

On Wednesday, the Asia-Pacific Journalism Centre will host an international video conference in Canberra for senior editorial staff in countries affected by the tsunami. Program director John Wallace says a focus will be to help news organisations devise strategies for covering the reconstruction period. Journalists from Jakarta, Colombo, Chennai, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Port Moresby (who reported on the 1998 Papua New Guinea tsunami) will take part in the conference.

The Dart Centre's Australasia branch, which provides journalists and their families with advice about how to deal with trauma and how to manage staff, will hold two forums - the first at the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday and the second in Sydney in early April, at a date to be confirmed.

Australasian director Cait McMahon says the effect of experiencing traumatic situations, such as the Port Arthur or Hoddle Street killings, car accidents or less obvious but stressful court reporting, is cumulative.

Her research from the 1990s on older journalists who had once reported on traumatic events found they had a higher rate of physiological health problems than journalists of the same age who had not done that sort of work. Her present research shows that 24 per cent of "trauma reporting" journalists have post-traumatic stress symptoms.

She says attitudes towards dealing with these issues have changed in the media since the "hard-nosed days of the 1980s".

The International Federation of Journalists has published a comprehensive report, Shaking Our Foundations, on the challenges for the media in the aftermath of the tsunami. It acknowledges the prompt action of both leading media groups, News Limited and Fairfax, in obtaining assistance from the Dart Centre for its staff.

For more information on Dart's Sydney forum, contact Cait McMahon on 0419131947.