Disaster, death, destruction. In the past few months every time you turn on the TV or open the laptop, there they are, laid out in colour, with a perfectly groomed journalist helpfully front and centre of the story. Which is pretty revolting, but not as much as the endless clips of that teenage brother and sister weeping for their mother killed in the Christchurch earthquake - now available with Touching Musical Accompaniment! After Black Saturday, Michael Gawenda’s Centre For Advanced Journalism conducted a study into journalists’ behaviour and motivations during that awful time. Nearly all who participated said that, with hindsight, they would have done at least some things differently. It gave us hope that perhaps next time a natural or man-made disaster swept through this part of the world, our Fourth Estate would show victims and viewers some consideration and respect.

If it weren’t for the feverish reporting of the heartbreak at Grantham we might have thought that the Queensland floods made it possible, for the most part, for this to happen. It’s the nature of floods that, as powerfully destructive as they are, they tend not to leap out and punch you in the face with little or no warning. The Queensland floods in particular took a few days to build up and, during both the crisis and the aftermath, the media served a genuinely useful function in disseminating vast amounts of vital information.

Bushfires and earthquakes will, however, king-hit everyone, and that lack of preparedness, the raw shock and the second-by-second dynamism of events catches everyone off-guard, exposing, for the most part, their true nature.

Much of the coverage of Christchurch this week has exposed a true nature of which many reporters and newsrooms should be ashamed. Jonathon Green’s piece on The Drum last week told us what we already knew, that The Media Is Not Your Friend, and the only people who took offence to his very good article were, surprise, surprise, other journalists.

I admit that criticising the MSM based on the behaviour of Channel 7 and 9 disaster reporters is a little like judging all sportsmen by the behaviour of Brendon Fevola and Mike Tyson, but stiff shit. Like lawyers who almost never sanction colleagues’ corrupt and unethical behaviour, the sacred self-important press only turn on those who dare to criticise their profession, not those who earn that criticism. The wailing and hurt and protestations of All The Good Things We Do Under Trying Circumstances from writers like Lyndal Curtis (writing on The Drum in reply to Green’s article) was nauseating.

There are things that reporters do that change history; the Vietnam War could have lasted much longer than it did if not for the images sent back by the press. The horror of drought exacerbated by an engineered famine in Ethiopia, the young man with his shopping bags staring down the tank in Tianenmen Square, the flag-draped coffins being loaded onto C-130s in Iraq, the horrors of Abu Ghraib. These are the things that make the press invaluable to us.

‘How do you feel after watching your home being destoyed?’, ‘Have you lost any loved ones?’, ‘Anyone been raped and speak English?’, however - these are the reasons that journalists rate somewhere around Used Car Salesman as a trusted profession.

There’s a line, somewhere. It moves with time and circumstances, which can make it a little hard to see sometimes, but the gray area between censorship and voyeurism is not so misty that trained journalists and TV news executives should have so much difficulty finding it.

Love to all who love us, and a week wiping the bottoms of the News Ltd goblins for those who don’t.

J&J Shaw

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