TV Eye: Quake coverage off the Richter

TV3's Mike McRoberts, sans flak jacket, reports from Christchurch in the wake of the big quake. Photo / Simon Baker

I write this by candlelight. Well not really. But days after the Canterbury earthquake I'm still shaking. I've gone out in sympathy - well I have in my heart - for the hundreds of thousands affected by what may well be judged the worst natural disaster, at least financially, in the country's history.

Only time will tell on that one, though if the TV news media's initial shock and awe coverage of the quake last weekend was anything to go by, Canterbury's big one is already something approaching Armageddon combined with Noah's flood, and a dozen war movies thrown in for good measure.

In the hours after the quake, the coverage - it was only on TV One, TV3 was mostly missing in action due, it claims, to power problems - was breathless stuff, despite that fact it was established very early that no one, not one single person, had been killed.

To begin with, I found myself caught up - to use the sort of nonsensical metaphor so common in TV news - in a tsunami of fear. Though mostly, it has to be said, I was worried about the lice.

In a live interview on Saturday morning with TV One reporter Donna-Marie Lever at Auckland's Whenuapai airbase, the Prime Minister, just moments before boarding a plane to Christchurch, said he was very concerned about the "potential loss of lice".

This was startling stuff. I knew that Christchurch was full of bogan boy racers, rugby obsessives and world-class political bores, but I knew nothing about its significant population of lice.

Could these be the earthquake's only casualties?

No idea. I've seen no dead lice in the TV pictures since, but there seemed to be an awful lot of fallen chimneys and masonry about, so perhaps they were lying under that.

In any case, back on Saturday morning, this business of the lice did count as disturbing news - or disturbing "Breaking News" as TV likes to call it when they have something they call a "developing story".

Other "Breaking News" ticking along the bottom of the screen during Saturday's TV One coverage, was rather less disturbing or surprising, however. One - "Residents tell of being awaken by an 'Almighty Shake"' - hardly seemed breaking news at all seven hours after a bloody big earthquake. I wasn't sure whether the "Breaking News" reporting "Police warning motorists to take care" was for Christchurch residents (who couldn't watch anyway because they had no power on Saturday) or just general advice to the rest of us.

Mainly the early rolling coverage suffered from that bane of 24-hour rolling news, too little information and too little footage which meant, for hours and hours, we saw the same images of broken buildings, sniffer dogs, crushed vehicles and that woman who was "heading for the hills" to avoid a tsunami.

Still funny things happen when news is breaking. Partly it's because events are moving at speed and the journalists on the ground and in the studio are struggling to keep up. Partly it's because nothing excites news journalists more than breaking news - and their enthusiasm to deliver coverage that might, you know, win them a gong at next year's media awards can lead to the big oversell.

There was certainly a clear tendency on Saturday's TVNZ coverage to ramp up the drama by gasping things like "there are amazing stories of survival coming in" or describing the destruction as "carnage" or having a reporter interview people with relatively minor injuries in their hospital beds or have a geewhiz item on the world's media ringing up to find out what was happening.

There was no need. Events were dramatic enough, though even the title news graphic on TV One's Saturday coverage got in on the melodrama. It didn't say something simple like "Earthquake", but:

Earth

Quake.

One word - and earthquake is actually a single word - was apparently deemed not dramatic enough. By making it two words, the coverage appeared more like a reality TV show or a Fox News broadcast.

Natural disasters are the sort the thing that TV, a reductive medium, does well. Disasters guarantee lots and lots of dramatic pictures, the aforementioned "amazing survival stories" and days and days of guaranteed, follow-up stories about the clean-up and the cost. Covering disasters doesn't require the sort of reporting that TV news is really bad at, like context, investigation or nuance.

But generally speaking, TV One's coverage (and at least they covered it all day Saturday; where was TV3, apart from The Nation and newsbreaks?) was sturdy enough and covered the bases. And it became more measured and rather less hyperventilating later in the weekend.

Both TVNZ and TV3 (when it finally started serious coverage at 6pm on Saturday) have thrown the kitchen sink at it, with TVNZ dispatching Simon Dallow and Mark Sainsbury to what's left of Canterbury, while TV3 has sent Mike McRoberts (minus his flak jacket but I've spotted him in a construction helmet) and John Campbell.

I had almost forgiven the lot of them for turning a very bad earthquake where no one lost their lives into Armageddon-combined-with-the-Flood, etc, until TV3's extended Sunday night 6pm news.

"While children are dealing with the fright they got yesterday," McRoberts intoned, "staff at Orana Park Wildlife Park are now dealing with a very sad loss. In the midst of miracle escapes and tales of survival, the park had the only known fatality from the quake. Gidro, a 10-year-old black and white lemur, drowned attempting to escape his moat-encircled enclosure. Four other lemurs came through the quake safely."

It had taken 36 hours, but TV had a body at last.

- TimeOut