News networks on shaky ground

Mike McRoberts reporting from the scene of the Christchurch Earthquake. Photo / Waynne Williams

A sick thrill. I'm sorry to admit it, but as a journalist it's what I felt when I opened my laptop at 6am last Saturday morning. Wow! Something big has happened.

In a small country like New Zealand where major news events don't happen often, it is a particularly palm-to-your-mouth moment. I immediately turned on the television but there was nothing but the usual programming - "buy an Abdominiser! - so I switched on the radio.

During the next few days, like most people, I voraciously consumed all the stories on the quake in print and on television. It seems we did pretty well at surviving the potentially devastating disaster but how did we do at covering it?

Not great, according to politician Peter Dunne, who blasted the media as "vultures" feeding off tragedy. Said Dunne: "We do not need the stars tramping over the rubble of Christchurch to advance their outlets' ratings."

After the initial scramble to cover the event, the two main television networks didn't help their cases by getting into an unseemly stoush about who had won the ratings war with early coverage of the catastrophe. TVNZ had two million people tune in to its Saturday coverage which, after the slow start, became the longest news broadcast in its history, running from 8am in the morning until 7.30pm that night.

TV3 had a slower start because of a failing energy supply in Christchurch which left its crew without power until about 2pm, which meant the channel could not do a continuous broadcast. After that, like TVNZ, it was all over the story. Every possible angle that could be found was covered, with presenters quickly choppered in to report from the scene.

Both television networks struggled to rise to the occasion - unlike radio they can't just walk into the studio and switch on the mike. TVNZ spokeswoman Megan Richards says at 4am on a Saturday morning it has only a couple of people in the newsroom, a few staff in presentation and a security guard on duty at its headquarters in Auckland.

"Television needs sound, lighting, camera crews, a director, producers, vision switchers, satellite technicians, reporters in the field, an anchor in the studio, etc," Richards says.

"It takes a while to rally all of these specialists at 4am on a Saturday without it being complicated by power and communication issues in Christchurch because of the earthquake."

TV3's Mark Jennings says as a news organisation, TV3 is very focused on providing fresh information. It did not want to run continuous coverage unless it could keep it updated but, in retrospect, it could have just repeated the key information with rolling coverage.

Longtime television journalist Janet Wilson, never normally scared to criticise her former employer, says she thought TVNZ did well in its coverage of the quake. Traditionally, TVNZ has been seen as a lumbering beast, with TV3 usually first off the mark, but this time Wilson says the state broadcaster came through.

"How many disasters do we get here? We're not CNN. In terms of match fitness it's possible they weren't ready but they scrambled and worked pretty hard."

Wilson says the irony is that TVNZ has restructured its newsroom to have a lot of what she calls "news clerks" managing the journalists. "They have news managers up the wazoo. But what happened [during the quake] was the complete antithesis; the people on the ground got into it and showed how it could be done."

TVNZ has been criticised for repeating a lot of content during its marathon broadcast, although you only need to tune into CNN or the BBC to see that even the biggest news players repackage and recycle the same material.

Christchurch-based journalism professor Jim Tully says TV3's main anchor Mike McRoberts had set up in his local cafe so he watched him reporting from the scene. "With a really big story they do go for the emotionally compelling stories. That sometimes doesn't ring true to people on the scene," he says. "I get a wee bit negative when I hear [cliches] like quake-ravaged' Christchurch."

A letter to the local paper the Press bemoaned the fact TVNZ's Mark Sainsbury focused on the sensational aspects. "What about all the people who have worked without a break since the quake? This idiot makes a point of seeking out only those who think in the negative."

But the point this letter-writer can't ignore is that during this event there was so much coverage everywhere and not all of it would be to everyone's liking. Upbeat, grim, formulaic, quirky; from the couple who married in the rubble to the woman whose toilet overflowed, there was a vast amount of content.

Tully says technology has transformed the way the media covered the event, especially the use of material supplied by viewers on the scene.

"The net has emerged much more significantly this time," he says. "It has changed things for the better. There is so much more info and it is not being mediated. "People are just responding honestly to the things they see and experience. It's real people talking not all packaged up. It raises good questions about citizen journalism and what we call news these days."

But TV3's Mark Jennings says he identified a drift back to the traditional media. "If you had gone back a few years most of us would have been saying online would have been the major player in an event like this but it was interesting to see a drift back to radio and TV... like a safety blanket or something."

Wilson, who recently hit the headlines when she criticised television's "tits and teeth" culture in which veteran journalists are replaced with inexperienced show ponies, concedes some of the young reporters did very well. "There has been some fantastic reporting from some of the young ones - across the board the tone has been very appropriate."

It can be hard getting the tone right when covering an event which is momentous and tragic on one level but somewhat banal on another. The television reporters used all the expected phraseology of destruction and despair - little hyperbole would be left if our journalists ever had to cover a tragedy on the scale of Haiti.

But some of the breathless adjectives did seem out of place with the down-to-earth, drearily pragmatic problems Christchurch's "survivors" were facing of holes, cracks, mud, mess and homelessness.

Here is Sainsbury talking to a couple in Kaiapoi: "You fell into this hole, didn't you? How did you get out?" "I pulled myself up on the edge." "How deep was the mud and silt?" "It was over the top of me." "Terrifying."

And then Sainsbury went next door to talk to someone else who fell in a hole. "I raced through the gate and fell in there. My husband pulled me out." Sainsbury to the husband: "No second thoughts about that, Lewis?" "No, always age before beauty."

There is only so much drama you can extract from people falling into holes and pulling themselves out, or stories about people stocking up on water at the supermarket. But unlike Peter Dunne, I am glad our media were there to tell us all about it.

-Herald On Sunday / View