editorial
16 Feb 2009
How Should The Fires Be Reported?
The Victorian bushfires have raised important questions about the role of the media during tragedy. How should the media behave, and where does newmatilda.com fit in?
What is the best way to cover traumatic events? How should we treat sensitive facts and a high death toll? When does coverage cross the line between vital information and mawkish exploitation? Are there topics that we should avoid as too painful? And when is it too soon to begin to ask what went wrong?These are all questions that survivors and victims, readers, journalists and news editors are asking in the wake of the Victorian bushfires. As the death toll continues to grow, debate has begun on comments pages, blogs, and in letters to the editor about the role of the media in reporting the disaster.
At newmatilda.com, this tragic event has raised important questions for us also. We've had a lot of feedback of our coverage of the fires. Many of our readers are from Victoria, so it's not surprising you are engaging with us on this. Some of you think that last Monday's article by our national affairs correspondent Ben Eltham, which asked what could have been done to prevent the disaster, was published too soon. Some have criticised us for what you see as blaming or judging the victims of the fires.
Having never covered a local disaster of this size before, we are to some extent still working out where newmatilda.com fits in the news cycle of such an event.
On Monday of last week, as the scale of the fires became clear, we were very aware that we needed to respond. We normally rely on people being there for coverage of big, unexpected events — yet calling our friends and family to ask them what they'd been through so we could publish their responses seemed insensitive at best, and downright tabloid at worst. We also admit that we were only just taking in the extent of the disaster ourselves, worried about family and friends who were still being affected by the fires, and of course — like so many people — somewhat distracted by the mounting death toll and images of destruction that just kept on coming.
On Monday night, we published Ben's piece, Could the Inferno Have Been Prevented?, which asked what could have been done differently in the lead up to the fires. We received a number of critical responses.
"I was rubbed up a little the wrong way at how early this article was published," one reader told us. "I mean, it was while many of us were still trying to find out if our family and friends were dead."
Another wrote: "I found Ben's article to be insensitive in parts — especially so soon after the tragic events of last Saturday. The better articles I have read have been written by people with expertise in the area; some of them with actual experience of last Saturday. Ben has no such expertise or experience and has cobbled together a knee-jerk article. I am disappointed that newmatilda.com chose to run it."
Many readers were critical of Ben's claim in the article that "there was a clear lack of fire preparedness among many residents living in the middle of the bush in the world's most fire-prone continent."
Reports on ABC news last Tuesday night highlighted that some people in fire-prone areas remain unprepared. However, we absolutely acknowledge that there were many who did all the right things and still perished. That is the terrible truth about these fires: they are beyond what we have ever seen before.
Many of our readers have pointed out, and we agree, that local ABC radio did a fantastic job in providing vital information to the victims of the fires. Others have written to tell us that the major newspapers had reporters on the ground immediately giving first-hand victim reports. Of course, these are both important functions. But newmatilda.com is not a national radio network or a daily newspaper.
So we thought we'd open up the conversation. We contacted a number of readers to provide us with their thoughts, and we invite the rest of you to join in below. What is the role of an outlet like newmatilda.com in the reporting of a national tragedy of this scale? Here are some of your responses.
— "I'm not sure what the media should do in a situation like this. I just knew that I was not ready to try to discuss what is just so immense that it is beyond words.
"I had a wrenching feeling of wanting to care so much but at the same time I wanted to shut out the horror. I didn't want to be part of the people slowing their cars to gawk at an accident. We must all learn from disasters so we can prepare for them next time but if you can call Slumdog Millionaire poverty porn then these sort of disaster are suffering porn.
"The news cycle likes drama but they unnecessarily milk it for every minute they can. Let it rest, let people start to recover before shoving it in their faces in glorious detail. There will be time afterwards to sort out plans to prepare for the future. If you feel pain and you keep having that magnified by the media, it is too easy to want to look for a culprit, someone to lash out at. Maybe it would be better to have some respectful quiet time so we can think with clearer minds. After we have helped everyone that needs looking after we can go bare knuckle keyboard again."
— "I have spoken to people in the Hurstbridge/Panton Hill area who confirmed that the fires moved so quickly there was no time for warning, and who know people who perished. So, those who posted in response to Ben Eltham's article's have a point when they note that there was little direct evidence for the allegation that there was a 'clear lack of fire preparedness', and, moreover, that it displayed a lack of tact and sensitivity to say so especially at this time.
"If we are to believe The Age, the town of Kinglake was in fact 'one of the best prepared for bushfires in Australia' and yet was one of the hardest hit; no one could have been prepared for the nature, scale and force of these fires."
— "A number of media including The Australian and the ABC have quoted local people and bloggers who blame ‘the greenies’ for the fuel load build up in the state’s forests. In my view a responsible journalist should take the time to report the forest management policies of the government, opposition, Greens, ACF and other interested parties: it is essentially a calumny to suggest that the Greens or others have a blanket opposition to fuel-reduction burns and other forms of forest management — far from it. Nor, despite the occasional bleatings to that effect of our local member, does Labor have a ‘deep green’ agenda on this matter.
"The wooded slopes on the eastern side of my valley are routinely burned by the DSE in autumn, and this happens widely across the region and I daresay the state. Appropriate journalism would lay such ‘rural myths’ to rest; blaming the ‘greenies’ is like blaming ‘the Jews’ for the Reichstag fire and responsible reporters should say as much. Insofar as arson is involved, it’s the arsonists who are to blame.
"There is certainly space for discussion and debate and re-examination of forest-management policies, and the establishment of a Royal Commission is welcome, but let’s not forget there is huge good will across the political spectrum. For that reason I was saddened to see the screaming headline in The Australian: ‘Bungling silenced Victoria bushfires warning’ — not in fact what the article went on to say, but great for fomenting blame.
"In the era of the blogger anyone can find a forum in which he or she can say pretty much anything, and that imposes an even greater duty of care and accuracy on those who would be journalists, especially those who presume to frame policy. NM should, as a niche-market journal, insist on the highest standards of evidence-based information, and, in the case of opinion, lucidly and well-argued analysis."
— "The Victorian bushfires caused such a major disaster, there is no point wasting time on niceties and people's feelings. What if there are no questions, no input on different methods of approaching a similar situation, and the same conditions happen again next week? How will those who want to pussy-foot around the issues react then? What if it is their property, their lives, their loved ones, in danger next time?
"Discussion needs to happen now, while it is still present in the forefront of our memories... I am quite shocked to meet this head-in-the-sand attitude, particularly from politicians. I don't expect them to be immune to disaster and tragedy, but they should be able to see the bigger issues, otherwise what use are they as our leaders? How can they lead if we all have to wait until they decide the time is right? Is one day enough? Or a week? Who decides?"
— "If there is any media response, it needs to focus locally on local needs, driven by locals. Government is about backing up the implementation of disaster planning, and media [about] assisting with the publication of disaster responsive news — assisting with provision of material needs, communication systems, identifying victims and survivors and linking survivors with their community and family, allowing [not forcing] the telling of stories.
"You need to determine when it is appropriate to get involved in analysis... I think that the nature of NM means that it has no place in a response to local issues of the sort I attach to the 'impact and emergency response' phase. Enough to express support and sadness and buy in when the ash has settled."
— "I think once we learn what has happened, we can start asking why. From memory, Ben Eltham's article was published on Tuesday. I don't think that's too early to at least start asking the hard questions. Ben Eltham's article did a reasonably creditable job. He identified what might be the factors that made the fires so deadly. My main criticism of it is that he quoted rather too approvingly David Packham's article in The Australian.
"Packham's article was vile. If you are looking for examples of how not to write opinion pieces on the tragedy, it would be a good starting point. He attacked 'academics' who he accused of being in favour of big fires and mudslides (without naming them). He also had a go at the CFA. I think the CFA did a great job in appalling conditions. They have just gone through the hardest and worst few days of their existence and I thought it was sickening to have this thrown at them.
"[The Australian] also had an editorial on Tuesday taking as given Packham's conclusion that the fires were caused by not enough fuel reduction burns, and attacking their usual enemies, the Greens. They had no qualms about using the tragedy as fodder for their culture war."
— "There have been some wonderful performances by the media and some atrocious performances. I don't think newmatilda.com did anything at all wrong in trying to understand why it happened. After all, that's what you're there for."
— "The thing I have liked least about the coverage is watching television news reporters carefully direct their questions in such a way as to elicit tears from the tough farmer, or the newly widowed wife. They seem to make a cliché out of these real people as soon as they film them.
"This, however, may be just my own discomfort with the emotionalism of the press. There is no doubt that this heartstring tugging has contributed to the impressive donations made in recent days. Maybe the nation needs to have a good cry together and the media is the means for that expression."
— "The tragedy reinforces the strengths — and weaknesses — of the different media arms. We now expect wall-to-wall TV coverage and technically, the coverage has been a marvel. We may disapprove of the compelling human-drama aspects of much of the coverage, but the fact remains most people get their news from TV and they want to empathise and connect with those who are grieving.
"Newspapers have settled into a new role with full-page colour pictures and a depth of analysis from experts and ‘literary’ journalism from staffers. They guard their flanks by investing in online resources.
"Radio, good ol’ steam radio, is left to crib information from newspapers, official releases, the odd interview with the usual suspects — police and fire commissioners and the like. Radio struggles to cope when the story is this big. It was good to read that regional ABC radio provided some ‘real time’ information on the advancing fire-fronts, particularly from 774’s twitter.
"On the question of what is appropriate coverage, nothing I have read or heard fell outside this description. I believe it is a very human response in the aftermath of such a tragedy to ask: Why? Just when is the appropriate time for analysis will always be a subjective one, short of government decree proscribing such public discourse."
— "The extra problem faced by NM is the capacity for any old Tom, Dick or Christopher to have their say. Perhaps you could consider dropping that function in situations where part of your readership is experiencing enormous grief and terror."
The range of comments we received mirror the range of responses that people will inevitably have in the wake of such a devastating event. We welcome your comments and feedback.
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The one media response that we could have really done without was the commercial TV news-bimbos in their lacquered hair-dos gushing their clearly unwanted rubbish over fire victims. These appalling Naomi Robson and Anna Coren clones are just the pits. The low point for me was hearing one of these idiots, when finishing an interview with a distraught bush-fire victim, telling the interviewee to "give them our love"! Her gall and self-centredness was simply breathtaking.
On every topic these days, there is far too much media sensationalism and speculation by the ill-informed. Fear-mongering for its own sake is rife and can be very disturbing as a daily diet. Circumspection and rational analysis are generally not characteristic of the media. On this topic of the bushfires the problem is far worse because of grieving victims close to home.
There is a Royal Commission to come, when hopefully all the facts will come out. It was interesting to read (just yesterday) the allegation that power cables, strung across some stretches with 2km between poles, snapped in high winds causing sparks which may have ignited fires. I did not hear that one until a week after the events, following so much attention to potential arsonists (heaven help them) and raging over various controversial environmental issues.
A bit of restraint is called for. Getting at the facts is supposedly why we have a justice system including judicial enquiries. But restraint of any kind is not in the media’s nature, unfortunately.
Yes NM, please lead the way.
Marnie, your entitled to your views and so are others in defending theirs, especially when some, have personal experience with the bureaucratic bungling, political shortsightedness and hypocrisy within governments nimby, green, prescriptive planning legislation and their local councils, local laws and by laws.
These deliberate political failures which produced the bush fires, are a blight on our society and the soft green pandering to animals, green space, climate change or population control, this time, will not hide or address the real problems.
How many commentators are just armchair environmentalist barking opinion to support their nimby views, judging from afar.
Stifling dissenting comment is usually the politically correct response in the attempt to drown out the truth on the ground. Maybe these warriors of good intention should tour the results of their policy prescriptions instead of trying to sidetrack comment.
Harry Morton If it bleeds it leads is the TV and dailies standard. The bushfires coverage was a sickening example of TV stations chasing ratings and intruding on the personal grief of traumatised people. It is now a standard method to stick a still or TV camera for close up shots of accident victims. Sometimes that is the first indication that family members have of the situation. If the bush fire coverage finally proves that people have had a gutful of this kind of thing it will be some consolation. I doubt it, so many viewers sat glued to their sets watching repeated coverage and lapping it up.
New Matilda might have broken new ground with analysis but mostly they followed. That’s okay. You can’t always do it.
What is very much needed now is the hard work that informs a Royal Commission. Intentions at this early stage are good but the information it gets will depend on many many people.
Here is one very very big job: The harvesting plan documentation of the State Forest agency will show the forest types and species types in all that burnt area. This can be supplemented by Parks and local government.
This is critical. Over the last 50 years there has been a systemic conversion of rainforest and wet old growth forest types for logs and woodchips and regrowth dry sclerophyll.
The loggers and their industry advocates Attiwill, Incoll, national loggers NAFI are desperate to get out first with simplistic at best, dishonest at worst, fuel load, hazard reduction issues. They think they can win this argument. But they can’t win their systemic destruction of wet fire resistant fire forest types. Indeed they are proceeding with exactly this conversion regime in East Gippsland with illegal loggin of rainforest at Dingo Creek exposed in the Vic Supreme Court in 2005. And similarly before that semi rainforest Goolengook. These places didn’t burn, Aborigines or otherwise for 150 years.
50 years is plenty time of time with highly mechanised operations of chainsaw and D9 bulldozer to change whole landscapes. Now this legacy is marrying with extreme weather events. Most of the firestorm seems to have monstered up from State Forest and farmland.
Yet the greenies are to blame? What’s wrong with this picture? The victims families, the govt, the big media are being played for suckers by the logging sector.
We must get the original forest types surrounding those destroyed towns converted to dry sclerophyll. They will tell the story. As will CSIRO July 2008 report of downward rainfall trend - less moisture means leaf litter does not rot down via fungi, lichens, mosses etc. All normal process in a wet old growth forest. As the path of the firestorm is slowly revealed the loggers narrative of greenies and fuel load is falling apart, making way for extreme climate and forest conversion in their own logging/farm land tenures.
You can talk about clearing of trees and stuff around homes in those towns but they were an inner circle with middle circle open paddocks and outer circle of loggers/4WD state forest by loggers. How did the firestorm even get to the inner circle??????? Dry sclerophyl regrowth.
Thanks Tom for making these important points. This is precisely what I’ve been telling people (though less well than you). It couples nicely with this point made by Rowena:
"I did not hear that one until a week after the events, following so much attention to potential arsonists (heaven help them)."
I would say, having read a few Australian papers that Australians (for the many) are getting less and less able to distinguish between stupid/foolish/uneducated firelighters and arsonists. Arson requires malicious intent to destroy property or people. At least one MP has downgraded the meaning in recent times to ‘deliberately lighting fires’. Well, I do that every day (in my stove). If it gets away and sets fire to my house, it isn’t arson, but foolishness/misfortune. Lighting a campfire/incinerator/barbeque/wacking detonators in high danger weather proves only foolishness. Every year, successively more and more the media and citizens seem to take the arson witch-hunt a step further, rather than attributing the blame where it *does* lie (see Tom’s post above).
And because we take the easy option (finding some hapless individual who started a fire that got away, and consumed with guilt admits to ‘arson’), it keeps happening. Crazy stuff. Forensics can prove a deliberate fire (in many cases), but it can’t prove the intent of the person/people who did it. Let’s stop the mindless lynching that the PM seems to be promoting, or at least, let the mob turn on him and his people (metaphorically, I’m not advocating lynching) instead of vagrants and children.
As to the essence of the article above; we follow world news in real time, as it happens. Look at the tragedy of the incarceration and bombing of Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan. Why should we be quiet when a tragedy befalls Australians about the culprits? It threatens the kind of behaviour that makes an official blank of meaningful discussion of events such as America’s ‘911’, and Britain’s ‘7/7’. Because, at the time, noone could talk about these events, noone was allowed to make the obvious statement that the blame lay with murderous foreign policy.
The same goes here; blame does need attributing, on many levels - councils approving for years and years the kind of suburban developments that put cash in fat cat pockets and give Australians who couldn’t otherwise afford it a house and land (albeit in the bush, literally). Such housing developments should never be approved (as they shoould never be approved where they’re built on reclaimed wetlands - a QLD favourite).
If you log industrially, and wholesale bulldoze, you change, as Tom said, the nature of the landscape. Wet sclerophyll to dry regrowth, and then you have conditions more ripe for fire. Climate change - which Australia actively contributes to - also plays a significant role. But I would say the speed of change here is probably more related, in this instance, to how Australia ‘manages’ its land. That’s not the fault of a foolish fire lighter, or of the people who think bush living is the life for them, but the fault, inexorably, of local councils and state/federal govt.
Blame them. Demand recompense. Demand change. These things need to be done while the iron is hot. Arson is a convenient catch cry to refocus people’s attention away from the real culprits, just as is the notion of sacredness of such tragic events. Compassion might mean holding your tongue when talking to a real victim’s family, but alternatively, it means attempting to ensure that the same mistakes don’t continue in the public realm. You can’t do that by being quiet about it.
cheers, Derek
The one thing I think television coverage of such a catastrophic event needs to do is show more dignity to the victims and not:
a. Stand in the remains of some poor person’s house to report on the tragedy (well done, Tracy Grimshaw) and then say that she never would have done it without the owner’s permission.
b. Have some insensitive idiot pushing for an answer to: "..but HOW do you feel?" while talking to a bush fire victim. Never caught that guy’s name.
c. Not oversaturate the site of the tragedy with reporters who actually got in while the bush fire victims could not and not only that, placed themselves in danger and made extra concern for the personnel down there trying to do their jobs. That is, there was no need for the phony concern of Leila McKinnon who could not have looked more phony if she tried. Or Peter Overton to even be there while there was already a team of reporters down there but to give him his due, he was consistent in his grim presentation of the facts..
d. Stop rehashing the same video clips on loops while the victims are in shock and grieving in their vile pursuit of ratings. Where is the respect for the victims?
Long story short, the television media need to acquire some dignified distance in situations like this and keep a limited number of reporters to more than adequately cover the basic facts. Drop all the oversaturated sensationalism which is sickening and bad taste newsmongering.
This aspect of journalism in fact is what has turned me right off television news reporting as a profession. Images sell and grief sells: as long as one station tries to better the other in the ratings war to crow about who was better in the awards ceremonies.
Then again, the news coverage was very comprehensive but oversensationlised and then reporters were coming out of the woodwork to have a look for themselves. Ghouls.
I found the internet coverage very comprehensive on ninemsn for example and very informative in terms of basic facts. The video footage was mercifully short and offered more scope with it’s range of links.
I don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers any more because I get all my news online and via television and normally I avoid watching things like this because of the parasitic behaviour of newshounds who are only after a front page headline.
I like the idea of keeping the PROCESS of news reporting simpler and less invasive to preserve the only thing these poor souls have left - their DIGNITY.
NM I think has maintained a dignity where other media outlets have not and shown more appropriate consideration for the victims.
Well done.
Derek. Tom, Thanks. But the time for NM to contribute to the Royal Commission has not yet arrived.
Dallas - you might like to read what Marnie was reporting - and apologise when you’re ready.
Many, like me and, I think, Rowena, are living on a high wire, waiting for the right time. And it will come and NM will have a great role to play at that time.
Marnie, thanks for trying to put such divergent perspectives into an approach for NM - good work!!
"But the time for NM to contribute to the Royal Commission has not yet arrived."
Are you saying we should we be quiet then?
cheers, Derek
Dallas Beaufort seems to have all the answers - why won’t she/he share them?
It’s one thing to rant about " political shortsightedness and hypocrisy within governments nimby, green, prescriptive planning legislation and their local councils, local laws and by laws.", but quite another to participate in reasoned debate about solutions or responses, beginning with the decisions to allow development in those locations in the first place. WHich nimbys are you talking about- the ones who don’t want to clear? th e pallning legislation could be a little mor prescriptive- though mostly it is performace based these days- in relation to residential subdivision in fire prone areas. And sadly, Australian councils and state governments tend to be democratically elected and reflect not some ‘pressure group’ but what is possible ina given situation. Not perhaps the greatest management tool, but better than many.
The fact of "truth on the ground" is that of course it is contested and partial like truth anywhere. Speaking as a resident of the north east fire zone who counts himself as a greenie, CFA member, chainsaw and wood fire owner, who has watched the two control burns by the DSE in State Forset in his valley in autumn in the last two years with great satisfaction.
Do share your widsom and experience, Dallas
Poll, I suggest you may want to access your councils database and research for yourself what is wrong with the system, and then make your own determinations.
Poll, the greens now have blood on their hands and don’t know how to wash it off !
Thankfully Dallas Beaufort QC will be there at the Royal Commission with the names and addresses of the offending greenies and nimbys. Sweet!
I suggest they be put to work clearing 100m firebreaks around Aussie homes before they return to useless arts degrees and bothering Centrelink.
No more pandering (should that be panda-ing) to animals or climate change for Dallas. He will walk the earth dispensing justice like a diminutive Paul Bunyon, knocking ferals from their trees with a swipe of his giant axe.
Complexity be damned. Inevitability can go to hell. Dallas is on the go! Don’t forget when he says we are entitled to our view what he really means is ‘Get fucked you armchair nimby greenie beaurocrat arsehole if I was in charge there would be no fires’.
Apart from sheer bloody-mindedness it is hard to fathom the reasons for the conservative columnists’ and bloggers’ attribution of the cause of the Victorian bushfires to the “greenies’” policies, which according to them, control every detail of life in Victoria. It is no surprise that most of this commentary comes from outside of Victoria.
The claims are bizarre in their vehemence and lack of understanding of the Victorian historical situation which has seen regular catastrophic fires regardless of particular fire ‘management’ strategies over the last hundred and forty years. The claim that fuel control burns would have prevented the fires being of such intensity in the 40-60m canopies of Victorian Ash forests on that particular Saturday is presented with no evidence. Victoria has an extensive program of fuel control burns in place which the DSE carries out when possible. The armchair experts assume that were they to rule the world everything would simply be right, and that the fleeting windows of opportunity for safe control burns would make for successful and safe outcomes.
Of course it would be paranoid to suggest that this outcry was the leading edge of a push by the timber industry to open up business opportunities on the back of a campaign of outrage manufactured against imaginary policies and practices, which paint the situation in simplistic terms. It’s much more likely that the Right, so used to being always right, is suffering from a lack of attention, and has decided that this is a convenient issue to create a coalition of people who speak first and think second.
Dear Doctor Dog, if that is your real name? Such language, is surely a sign that the greens and their policy wonks now have blood on their hands and don’t know how to wash it off ! Try coming up with some solutions, because at this stage failure is ever present.
Sometimes it’s the ideas not the words which are foul
Sorry Dallas, you got me on one of those Christian Bale days. My real name is Col but Dr Dog just sounds better. Vanity eh.
I do think that you are being a little incendary yourself though with the ‘blood on hands’ stuff. Greenies may have contributed to the policy but these were unprecedented fires anyway. I do mean it when I talk about complexity and inevitability, fires happen in the bush, no matter what. A range of policy and climatic conditions exist that influence those fires. It seems wird that you should rail at climate change decisions, since there is little doubt that climate change is making for worse fires.
In terms of solutions I can only tell you mine, which is to build underground and into hillsides. That is what I would do but I don’t presume to tell others how to live.
Col, the weather turned for the worst and with all that extra prescribed fuel loading on the ground the responsible in our community are saying loudly, I told you so,remember, loudly, which only now will have an effect as we have seen so much whitewash in the past. A problem is that the good are labored with half baked policy prescriptions prepared on the basis of some bad examples and are then followed by a continuous flood of practically untested policies which roll out over us all. When producers have to fight legally to uphold performance based sustainable practices,then resentful attitudes result and fester away until disaster occurs and retribution is theirs as ignorance is no defence .
Derek, Yes.
Dallas, two fantastic sentences without trial.
Poll, I agree, and I think it would be good to locate ourselves.
Christopher , CFA VIC fire region 15 [which has had a miraculous escape from the fires so far, but which is stealing water from the fire-ravaged areas to continue to exist. 2ml of rainfall so far this calendar year.] Try telling me that climate change has nothing to do with it, that the Greens are wrong, and that we need more people not trees.
But I should not predict the findings of the Royal Commission. Continue
phermon,
Why? Are readers of this news online forbidden from speaking about the events lest we inadvertently influence the royal commission in a negative way? Why is it prudent to keep lips sealed if the commission has been set up to do a comprehensive job? If it’s that open to influence, you can bet it *will* be subverted, not by you or I, but by people wishing to keep the decades of forest mismanagement and leafy developments out of the limelight.
It’s precisely for that reason that people should speak up - to ensure that no white-washing (or inappropriate scape-goating) occurs in the process. Or have government led commissions now become sacred?
There have been some interesting and serious contributions on the subject here already - I would hope that the same is happening across the whole of Australia. Otherwise, you can almost guarantee that either
-the easy path will be taken during the course of such a commission, or
-the recommendations it provides will be kept out of the public eye where they conflict with council/government initiatives.
Very little useful is ever achieved where the public choose to sit back and content themselves that someone more important than them will come up with the answers for them. A commission sounds like (in theory) it follows the same format as a coroner’s report; its a gathering of information from people who have evidence to share, by a central core of people who are no more or less enlightened than the rest of us. In a fair commission/report, the one quality the central members will offer is tenacity/thoroughness. If they read what is being said and that leads to clues (I doubt they would) that can be confirmed or denied by experts in such fields, all the better.
So why the call for silence, or tongue-biting? Your ideas - despite a call for silence - seem sound enough, as do others. This is no one-issue problem, but a compounding of several key elements, some of which you mentioned yourself. Allowing people to read these things to offset what we might hear in the msm is never a bad thing. Derek
Watching some of the aerial views of the aftermath shown on Four Corners this week, I noticed that where houses had been burnt to the ground, often closely surrounding trees on the properties still appeared green (from above at least). It appeared in places that mainly the houses had burned. I think some of these shots were of Marysville. I could not tell what types of trees they were. I am an amateur, but it did seem a bit odd as it was not obvious to me how the fire had moved through. No doubt the experts will know what happened.
To the Australian Firefighters,
I wanted to thank you so much for all the help you have given my country in the past. Several years ago we had similar devastating wild fires. Firefighters, from all over Australia, came to our side to fight these fires. I will never forget the bravery and selflessness I witnessed from our friends, the Australians.
I always tell my friends the Australians have principals and the (excuse me ladies) balls to back it.
Your eternal friend, Paul
Interesting foray for Ross Gittins
"The Punters Love a Good Disaster"
http://business.smh.com.au/business/the-punters-love-a-good-disaster-200…
Good article, I agree with Ross
I was one of the people critical of Ben’s article - the timing of it and the statement about people not being prepared. Someone wrote into The Age today asking if people should have tsunami plans or earthquake plans - such was the ferocity of this bushfire that it appears no sort of plan would have helped. That said, there are stories coming out of people managing to save their houses. But it’s way too early to work out whether it was a result of good planning or just good luck.
One of the questions I hate from the journalists is "Will you build here again?" If I was in that situation I would take the microphone and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine. Helen
Locally our concerns are more prosaic ,
the line of reporters outside the relief centre was akin to making the locals run a gauntlet - what about some respect ?
Also appears early reports of a looter in Buxton was a film crew trespassing on a property and filming through the windows of a person’s house , pretty traumatic way for the owner of the house to find out its still standing. Fortunately arrests were made.
The real story is not the obvious shock and trauma but the response of the immediate community. In Alexandra the local Red Cross and SES volunteers where there as soon as the first refugee convoys arrived and covered the first 24 to 30hrs while the emergency response geared up.
The refugees have been absorbed into the community , family ,friends , empty rental houses , houses for sale, holiday houses and spare caravans. Journalists would follow these positive human interest stories , whereas our mainstream media seems determined to deepen the trauma by dwelling on the negative and the contentious.
As for new matilda , I hope to continue to rely on the stories and the commentary for insightful fact finding , so no Ben Elthams initial piece was of little use. However Tom McLoughlin’s comments provide an insight that I will research.
Alexandra - Vic.
The Age newspaper in Melbourne during the Victorian heatwave through January and early February 2009 immediately preceding the bushfires, ran headlines repeating the extreme bushfire risk. On 6 February 2009, the day before the fires started, indeed the Premier of Victoria John Brumby issued a warning about the extreme weather conditions expected on 7 February: "It’s just as bad a day as you can imagine and on top of that the state is just tinder-dry. People need to exercise real common sense tomorrow".
Was this wise?
To serial dormant bush arsonists and to would be arsonists, this frenzied media excitement about such pending doom surely would have been been read by arsonists and I suggest directly incited the bush arson. Yet at the time there was no complaining or realisation of this. If bush arsonists are found to have been the key causes of the ignitons and indeed of the most catestrophic firestorms that burt alive people for instance Marysville and Kinglake, then the investigation must focus on the root cause of the arsonist motivations. I argue that media arousal through its sensationalising of the bushfire risk and its portrayal of the bushfire threat is directly responsible and accountable for actual bush arson. The Royal Commission Interim Report seems vacuous on this.
What of press responsibility? Let’s look at where the Press Council actually prescribes reporting restrictions on journalists. Take the subject of media reporting of suicide. In the Council’s General Press Release No. 246 (i) (July 2001) on Reporting of Suicide, The Press Council “calls upon the press to continue to exercise care and responsibility in reporting matters of suicide consistent with government attempts to curb the suicide rate. Research shows that an association exists between media portrayal of suicide and actual suicide, and that in some cases the link is causal. So the Press Council recommends journalists avoid reporting which might encourage copy-cat suicides and which unnecessary references details of or the place of a suicide, or which uses language which trivialises, romanticises, or glorifies suicide.” [SOURCE: http://www.presscouncil.org.au/pcsite/activities/guides/gpr246_1.html]
So on the sensitive topic of suicide, the Press Council is quite prescriptive, moreso than in its broader principles for journalists rights.
Serious thought needs to be given by all levels of government and by the Press Council as the media industry’s representative body to the reporting of bushfire risks. Just as links can be drawn between the media portrayal of suicide and actual suicide, causal links can be drawn between the media portrayal of bushfire risk and bush arson arousal.
This is a matter for criminal psychology. Media sensationalising of bushfire risk and of bush arson is known to incite bush arson and copy-cat bush arson. This is a little known and neglected form of social deviant behaviour, yet it has become increasingly prevalent and deadly.
There is an urgent need for national level investment into bush arson criminology research and investigations. Media rights and responsibility for reporting bushfires play a critical role perhaps more that many of us realise.
[Previously posted on www.candobetter.org]