Trampling on the truth

Andrew Gilligan weighs in with an assessment of the failings of western media in tsunami devastated areas.

"You have to feel sorry for the 24-hour news people. There is an awful lot of space to fill. And since they haven't got time to go out much, they have taken to feeding off each other, producing worthy successors to those legendary media myths of previous big news events - the 'furious Afghan winter', the 'uprisings of the Arab street', the 'siege of Baghdad'."

Top of Gilligan's list of new myths is the "the race against time to feed the hungry story." In Sri Lanka.

Second is the story about how all the dead bodies will "spread disease" and the "new fears of killer cholera".

Third on the list is the tale of the "killer crocodiles" in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands "washed ashore" by the tsunami, who have been "stalking" villagers in the affected area ... (hadn't heard that one)

According to Gilligan, Sri Lanka is doing OK. The devastation is not as bad as the international media is making out.

I supppose it depends on your perspective. 30,000 + people killed in ten minutes sounds pretty devastating to me. To be fair though, Gilligan warns against complacency in the west - perhaps as a result of what he sees as sensational reporting - and corruption from local officials. Fairly standard fare.

But then he finishes with this:

"Before we become too self-satisfied at seeing the rich and poor worlds working together for once, we must add a sobering coda. The horrific death toll was because of a massive failure of the international community.

If the warnings issued in California and Hawaii, hours before the tsunami, had been passed on to the people on the other side of the planet whom it was going to hit, far fewer people would have been killed - though there would still have been devastation."

It's as if he set out to write two stories and halfway through the second one tossed it but kept the lead par and tacked it on to the bottom of the first story. This isn't a logical conclusion based on the rest of the piece, and it's incorrect.

As desirable as it would have been to have adequate warning of the tsunami, it didn't happen for a number of reasons. Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing, but dumping on the "international community" in general suggests Gilligan just wants to blame someone ... anyone.

And it adds an unintentional layerof irony to the heading The Australian's sub-editors have given his piece.

The story in pictures

"Into a million homes came a grieving mother crouched beside the lifeless bodies of tiny children, and perhaps more horrifying, three pairs of feet extending from beneath a white sheet in an upper corner, suggesting the presence beyond the frame of row upon awful row of the tsunami's pitiless toll."


source: New York Times

It's a question pictorial editors everywhere have been grappling with since the news broke. What are the boundaries of acceptable taste? The Times' Public editor, Daniel Okrent, says:

"Mix a subjective process with something as idiosyncratic as taste and you're left with a volatile compound. Add human tragedy and it becomes emotionally explosive. The day The Times ran the picture of the dead children, many other papers led with a photograph of a grief-racked man clutching the hand of his dead son. It, too, was a powerful picture, and it's easy to see why so many used it. But it was - this is difficult to say - a portrait of generic tragedy. The devastated man could have been in the deserts of Darfur, or in a house in Mosul, or on a sidewalk in Peoria; he could have been photographed 10 years ago, or 10 years from now. His pain was universal.

But the picture on the front page of The Times could only have been photographed now, and only on the devastated shores of the Indian Ocean."

It's an important issue, and certainly breathes life into the paper's otherwise earnest debates with readers about political bias and newsworthiness.

ABC's Radio National covered the issue this morning. Unfortunately, there's no transcript yet but I'll add it as soon as it becomes available.

There was a lot of this sort of discussion during the Iraq War. When are confrontingly graphic images appropriate and when are they not? It's not simply a matter of access. One of the arguments about war versus natural disasters is that war coverage is restricted by military authorities. This is true, but there are still many horrible pictures from war zones that are not run in the daily paper because they don't add anything to the story.

That said, we did run a picture of the dead Hussein brothers on theage.com.au in July 2003 and copped some flack from readers. It was a very different situation, of course.

There was also a lot of discussion about the use of images from 911. The Australian Financial Review used a picture of a man falling from one of the towers on their front page a day or two after the attacks. Their justification was that it showed the human side of the horror in a way that longshots of the burning buildings did not.

Pictures are uniquely powerfully and confronting. One of the effects of the desperate images of victims from the tsunami is to help convey the full impact of the disaster to people in far away countries who might otherwise shrug and carry on as if nothing had happened.

Views v News

The Guardian reports a fascinating debate prompted by the Independent's new strategy of remaking itself as a 'viewspaper'.

Format changes have boosted sales at the Independent and the Times, but alternative news sources such as rolling TV news stations are also forcing a rethink of editorial approach. Newspapers are no longer the primary source for breaking stories and must adapt accordingly.

"Alan Rusbridger said the Independent's conversion to a 'viewspaper' posed pivotal questions about the future of newspaper journalism. 'If you have got news organisations saying "we are putting news behind views", this is a fundamental statement about what newspapers are for and what journalism is for ... It is radically new, it is not what serious broadsheet journalism was about.'"

Small miracles, part 4

* An elderly Sri Lankan man was miraculously found alive in the ruins of a building devastated by the killer tsunami two weeks ago. He was haggard and dehydrated but semi-conscious, local media said yesterday.

* A 70-year-old Indonesian man has been found alive after surviving for 11 days under the rubble of his home that was demolished in the tsunami disaster

Not fade away

"There is an old, politically incorrect saying in newsrooms: How do you change a front-page story about massive flood devastation into a 50-word news brief buried inside the paper? Just add two words: 'In India.'"

The story moves on. The players are jostling for kudos.

Small miracles, part 3

A teenage boy marooned by the tsunami clung to a tree for 10 days in India's remote Andaman Islands chain without water or food before being rescued.


Cambellway in the Andaman and Nicobar islands after the tsunami hit. Photo: Reuters

Blogpower to the people

A while back Simon Waldman wrote:

"The more I learn (and frankly, I still feel pretty dumb in these matters), and the more I look, the more I realise that blogging’s great legacy is likely to not be the individuals who sit at the top of the power curve, but the incomprehensible swarm: and, critically, the order that emerges from it."

It's an attractive thesis, and the daily traffic statistics seem to bear out the current churning at the top of the order. Cheese and Crackers is sitting at no. 1 today (up from #588) with 464, 474 daily visitors. Can you believe it! There isn't a web site in Australia that gets that amount of traffic each day - and I don't count ninemsn as one site.

But not long ago Daily Kos was on top. Today it's a distant second with 220,224 visitors. (To clarify, I'm talking about today's standings not the overall rankings in which Daily Kos sits at no.2 and Instapundit at no.1.)

The difference is in the current news cycle. Cheese and Crackers has only been going for a few weeks but site founder, Jordon Golson, made the fortuitous decision to post a large number of tsunami videos. His traffic stats have hit the stratosphere in the 10 days since then.

During last year's US Presidential election it was Wonkette and Daily Kos that were the hottest items in the blogosphere. Both operate as collectives with a small editorial team. Cheese and Crackers is a one man show, in purist blogger style, and even uses the venerable blogspot template. (Bloggers tend to drop blogspot when they hit the bigtime.)

It's hard to see how Golson might parlay this amazing amount of traffic into a steady revenue stream, but he's clearly a sharp guy so we can probably expect him to turn a coin out of it somehow, and equally clearly he's helped identify a major trend in blogging.

Jay Rosen has pointed towards the emerging trend of vlogging as the phenomenon to watch in 2005.

I've got to say it's refreshing to see this sort of meritocracy in action. If your ideas are smart enough and your execution sharp enough, you're on your way. According to Pew blogs are well and truly on the public radar, albeit sitting a little low on the screen right now. That will change.

Small miracles, part 2

An Indonesian tsunami survivor, who was swept out to sea, drifted on debris in deep ocean for eight days surrounded by dead bodies "left and right".

Quick thinking
10-year-old Tilly Smith is being hailed as a hero after saving her parents and dozens of fellow vacationers from the deadly tsunami - thanks to a school geography lesson.

This is the end

According to Steven Winn,

"Endings once seemed a more straightforward matter than they do now. Shakespeare rounded off his sonnets with rhyming couplets and his comedies with a comforting final speech or song. Victorian novelists married off their heroines. Composers sent their listeners off with a resounding resolution from dominant to tonic chord."

Or as Jim Morrison once wrote:

"This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you'll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end"

It all sounds a bit easy. Surely it wasn't always like that? I wrote a little about novelistic endings for a project some years ago.

According to George Eliot "beginnings are always troublesome, but conclusions are the weak point of most authors ... some of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best a negation". Alternatively, endings can be described as endings "only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they are immanent".

In a 1934 letter to Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald described his own sense of an ending, and also Hemingway's and Joseph Conrad's:

"The theory back of it I got from Conrad's preface to The Nigger, that the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after effects in the reader's mind.... The second contribution...was your trying to work out some such theory in your troubles with the very ending of A Farewell to Arms. I remember that your first draft - or at least the first one I saw - gave a sort of old-fashioned Alger book summary ... and you may remember my suggestion to take a burst of eloquence from anywhere in the book that you could find it and tag off with that; you were against the idea because you felt that the true line of a work of fiction was to take a reader up to a high emotional pitch but then let him down or ease him off. You gave no aesthetic reason for this - nevertheless you convinced me."

What is this preoccupation with endings? Winn argues that

"Endings took on a special cast in the 20th century, when world wars and the specter of nuclear holocaust gave finality a darker shade. Every ending, however distant, held the seeds of ultimate destruction. Beckett spun out an infinite, unresolved slow fade in Waiting for Godot. Charles Ives composed his Unanswered Question. Joyce spooled the last line of Finnegans Wake to the first, as if to evade the essential anxiety of beginnings and ends. Endings became provisional, fraught and charged with deeper meanings."

This much is true. Robert Musil certainly fits the description. And we can add that as the century drew to a close there was an increasingly shrill attention to and interest in, endings. It fitted a postmodern millenial outlook neatly. It was all about 'closure'. But haven't we passed that stage?

The art of blogging

Joe Carter has put together a particularly insightful series of comments on blogging:

1. How to start a blog
2. The beginners toolbox
3. Become an A-list blogger
4. The art of marketing your blog
5. Owning a micro-niche

Pejman Yousefzadeh also makes some good points on Blogging 101.

And a while back Tim Dunlop had some interesting things to say about the potential of blogs to put the public back in public intellectual:

"Just as punk rock shook a fist at the pretentious, bloated 'progressive' thing that rock music had become, and found a way for anybody with the guts, the inclination and something to say to pick up a guitar and command an audience, so blogging has risen up to challenge the soundbitten, amnesiac, pale little thing that PR-spun democratic politics has become."

The whole discussion around what blogs are and what they can do has started to splinter off into a number of narrower, but related discussions. Tim Dunlop has one angle, and Steve Outing at the Poynter Institute has another. Both interesting and relevant. Something is brewing.

And it's been brewing for a while. The experts have had a lot to say about it.