How Should We Handle Deaths When Reporting Current Events?
by Latoya Peterson
So, this morning, I was co-hosting Crappy Hour on Jezebel with Megan. (I’ll be there the rest of the week.) We actually happened to get into a bit of a debate over the way that the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were covered.
Over the weekend, reader Frida alerted me to some oversights in the coverage:
I’ve been keeping a close eye on news reports coming out of Mumbai regarding the horrific terrorist attacks of the past three days. One thing that I was sure of was that among the foreign casaulties, at least one Asian, a Japanese businessman named Hisashi Tsuda, had been killed.
However this article on CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/11/28/india.attacks/index.html at 11:14 AM EST, lists “one Chinese” among the dead, with no mention of a Japanese casualty. This is the sentence, “including three Germans, two Americans, an Italian, a Briton, an Australian and one Chinese were among the at least 15 foreigners killed –”
Now if there are fifteen foreigners, and the nationalities of nine are listed, that means the nationalities of six of the victims were not disclosed. I guess that COULD mean that one Chinese person did die, and a Japanese was among the nationalities not mentioned in the CNN article.
But, alas, there is the possibility that some CNN Online staffer/writer got a bit confused by the whole theory that “Chinese” and “Japanese” are not the same and are not interchangeable, and put down “Chinese” casaulty when he or she really meant “Japanese” casualty. Because I have not seen any other news outlets at this time mention anything about a Chinese casualty.
If this is the case, that’s sort of disrespectful, no? In case they edit before you see it, here is a screencap I took some minutes ago: http://i34.tinypic.com/e98ajc.jpg with “Chinese” underlined.
I started watching the coverage, to look for more information for Frida, but quickly became horrified at the way the same few shots were shown over and over – blood on the floor of the hotel, wounded and bleeding people being carried to safety. It was a bit jarring to me, as it just felt like the images were placed for maximum shock and horror. It was also odd, as I remember watching coverage of the terrorist attacks in London back in 2005, and not seeing much besides external shots of buildings, tunnel data, and surveillance cams before and after the event. Why the difference in this situation?
I brought that up this morning, and Megan and I had a bit of a disagreement:
MEGAN: Welcome to another grey, rainy D.C. morning. This did not help me drag my ass out of bed.
LATOYA: Yeah, the bed was strangely warm this morning. Ah well — I’ll throw on some T.I. and that will get me started. In the meantime, have you been watching what’s going on in Mumbai?
MEGAN: Yeah, what a terrible long weekend.
LATOYA: Understatement. The coverage was horrifying. Not just from a fucking asshole terrorist standpoint. But also from a “how do we cover things that go down in other nations” standpoint? I got emails all weekend from readers (of Racialicious) about the way this attack has been treated.
MEGAN: Well, “how do we cover things that do down in another nation on a holiday weekend” standpoint, I think.
LATOYA: No, this is a bit different. Did you watch any of the TV coverage? Lots of shots of the blood on the floor. Bleeding people being dragged to safety. While normally, if we are covering something that happens in the west, we only shoot the building, and shots of people and their families.
MEGAN: I hardly ever watch TV coverage of anything, honestly, and particularly not network coverage.
LATOYA: Maybe a destroyed item, like a bombed car.
MEGAN: Actually, I have a huge problem with not showing injured people.
LATOYA: We show more respect to the human casualties. Why do you have a problem with it?
MEGAN: Because I think that when we minimize the effects of violence, we minimize it’s impact. I criticized the media a lot in the wake of the Bhutto assassination for sanitizing the violence. I don’t agree that we shouldn’t show white people, but I think we should show all of it. What turned people against Vietnam? Seeing the truth of violence.
LATOYA: Perhaps. And yet… we wrote about this before. Tami contributed a piece called “The Brown and the Dead” which focused on the discrepancy of coverage given.
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