Photo by Logan Abassi/UN
At The New Republic, Noam Schieber argues the blanket media coverage of the Haitian earthquake aftermath is just too much. It’s redundant, it’s interfering with aid operations, it’s a waste of resources. His solution: pool coverage. Just as the president is followed around by a rotating pool of reporters, maybe Haiti and other natural disasters should be too:
Just like they do for White House coverage, the major (and some not so major) news organizations could draw up an agreement to send a contingent of print, radio, and television reporters to wherever the next global disaster strikes. The participating news organizations could then use the raw material transmitted back to them to fashion their own reports. The pool correspondents could even be available to conduct on-air interviews with different television organizations, depending on their editorial needs. The arrangement would obviously be less than ideal for the outlets with the biggest budgets. But, collectively, the media would have the peace of mind of knowing it’s not exacerbating the same problems it’s trying to alleviate.
I yield to no one in my contempt for the crass, sensationalistic conventions of TV news (which, given technical demands and the quest for ratings, has by far the biggest footprint of any media). And the coverage of natural disasters employs most of those conventions, notably the faintly ridiculous notion of journalist-as-globetrotting-hero.
But do we really need less coverage of Haiti? (more…)
