PressEthic

OpenDemocracy.net’s article “The numbers game: death, media, and the public” looks at the casualty counting that has become all too familiar due to the number of natural disasters over the past months. The author, Jean Seaton, uses the Hurricane Katrina early estimate of 20,000 deaths as an example of the lax research that eventually proved thankfully wrong. She blames the swift changes in the number on the journalist’s tendency to go on the word of officials rather than a source with more on-site knowledge.

I don’t know if Seaton effectively makes the case, as the article’s heading would suggest, that there are negative democratic implications to this speculation, but she makes a good point with the following:

There are many reasons for the numbers changing – not least that nobody had the slightest idea of how to begin to estimate the impact of the catastrophe; they had only their eyes and, as it turns out, they were not necessarily reliable… A very large disaster must, the scenes implied, have killed a very large number of people.

Humans were tested again this past Saturday with a major earthquake in the South Asia areas of Kashmir and Pakistan. Almost immediately, officials and media organizations began guesstimating. Like an atomic clock, the number changes before we can blink. Within three sentences in this CNN headline article, the number of deaths goes from 30,000 to 80,000.

However, if CNN wants people to understand the magnitude of the devastation, they need only rely on reporting like this, found in an accompanying article:

Unknown numbers of Pakistanis are sleeping in the open in near freezing temperatures at night and they have lost everything. Across wide areas there is no power, or adequate food or water.

There isn’t a number in sight but any reader can relate to the desperation of people without sustenance and shelter from the cold.

Seaton also stresses the need for a context because many people didn’t realize that the waters off the coast of New Orleans were a huge oil source (“It’s not just a pretty place but a vital industrial port,” she says).

Again, in the case of this weekend’s earthquake, a description of what this area was like before the earthquake struck would be helpful. We know that there’s a girl’s school because there are stories of parents pulling away rubble with their hands to get to their children. But what else are the people in Balakot or Muzaffarabad doing on Saturday at 8:50 a.m.?

Numbers, when they get too high, have a tendency to blur into a lump of bigness without any meaning. Especially now where it seems earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis are happening every month, the public will quickly become desensitized to these numbers if journalists aren’t more careful about tossing them around. Reporters must use their senses and strong storytelling skills to convey why we should continue to be horrified.