The Media In Action

Media Struggle to Convey a Disaster

By Brian Stelter and Richard Pérez-Peña
Published: January 14, 2010

The Fox News correspondent Steve Harrigan is a veteran of the world’s worst calamities, but on television on Thursday afternoon, as he stood beside one of the piles of rubble that pockmark Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he broke down.

He had watched a woman wailing in the street, having lost four of her children to Tuesday’s earthquake and the fifth child at a hospital later.

“That kind of loss is horrific in any culture, but in a culture where you’re utterly” — Mr. Harrigan lost his composure while trying to say the word “alone” — “it just makes it all the more difficult.”

Amid banner headlines and hours of television coverage, reporters and anchors struggled to convey the enormousness of the devastation in Haiti on Thursday, as the world’s news media directed their collective attention to the crippled country.

By Wednesday evening, about 24 hours after an earthquake estimated at a magnitude of 7.0, two of the nation’s three network evening news anchors were live on television, albeit barely, in Port-au-Prince. Reporters and photographers for major newspapers had also reached the city. By Thursday, larger contingents of reporters had arrived.

“Outside of a military conflict, this is the biggest international deployment since the tsunami” in 2004, said Tony Maddox, the managing director of CNN International.

In some cases, reporters and anchors were arriving well ahead of international relief organizations. In other cases, they were hitching rides with them.

“Wherever you are,” Anderson Cooper of CNN said Wednesday night, “hug a loved one close and thank God you are not in Port-au-Prince tonight.”

The broadcast networks expanded their half-hour newscasts to one hour each on Wednesday and Thursday. ABC News produced a special report in prime time on Thursday, pre-empting an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

According to The Columbia Journalism Review, there is only one foreign correspondent based in Haiti, Jonathan M. Katz of The Associated Press. The news agencies Reuters and Agence France-Presse employ Haitian-born reporters in the country.

Initially, networks and newspapers found themselves supplementing professional reporting with the Twitter tweets and cellphone videos of witnesses in Haiti.

On Wednesday, when no Wall Street Journal reporter had yet been able to reach the scene, former colleagues suggested recruiting Pooja Bhatia, 33, a former Journal reporter living in Haiti on a fellowship. Hers was one of two bylines on the top article on the paper’s front page on Thursday. The same day, The New York Times published a first-person article by her on its Op-Ed page.

“I was here during the 2008 hurricanes that left thousands dead, and thousands and thousands homeless, and that felt like the apocalypse,” Ms. Bhatia said in an interview. “But that pales in comparison to this.”

In Haiti, “the biggest challenge is that the entire infrastructure of Port-au-Prince has collapsed,” said Steve Capus, the president of NBC News.

Reporters equipped themselves with satellite phones and clips that allow them to draw power from car batteries for their laptops, cameras and phones.

Several times in the continuing cable news coverage, Mr. Cooper and other reporters drew comparisons to the scenes they witnessed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The CNN correspondent Gary Tuchman said: “Roll back the clock four and a half years ago. What déjà vu.”