Reporting the Earthquake

The San Jose (Loma Prieta) earthquake of 1989 coverage illustrates a fatal problem with the way our news media work.

We have friends in San Jose, so as soon as we heard of the earthquake we turned on the TV news, which ran steady coverage. We couldn't call, since some phone lines were out and the rest jammed, so we had only the broadcasts to tell us where the damage was.

The talking heads didn't have a lot of info at first either, and had to keep urgently repeating what little they knew for the benefit of people who had just tuned in. The Goodyear blimp found a real use for a change, turning the camera away from the ballfield to the damaged city.

A building had caught fire, and the blimp kept its camera zoomed in on that house for the next few hours, oblivious to the rest of the city, until the blimp ran out of fuel and started getting blown out to sea. No doubt this footage told a story--of trouble and struggle and eventual victory. Cute. But what I, and the rest of the country wanted to know was: is that typical? Was the whole city burning? Or was it unscathed and this the only problem? What was going on?

By focusing on the dramatic, the news producers effectively lied to us about the city.

What should they have done? Panned the city of course. Sweep back and forth, and zoom in on random spots. Once that footage is in hand, then select the hot spots. Intersperse current footage of the hotspots with rerunning that whole-city pan: that would have satisfied their lust for exciting footage with our desire for accurate information, or at least a representative picture of the troubles.

They could also have put up a map with little colored stickers to show where they'd had phone calls from (telling which regions had phone service), color coded to tell how much damage the informant had seen. That would have been simple and effective, and maybe even useful to rescue workers.

Of course, any time you read a news report (or watch one) of a situation you have detailed knowledge of, you're astonished at how inaccurate the result is. I served on a grand jury once, and never did the news report of a crime closely resemble the testimony we heard later. When the science reporters unburden themselves of a story on a field I know something about, they never get it straight--not even the biggest name newspapers (though they do make fewer and subtler mistakes).

Its an old story: reporters have to get the story fast and and make it interesting, and accuracy loses. Trying to make the story exciting (over and above interesting) makes it even worse. And when you spend months trying to make a measurement accurate and understand the errors, to see it hawked out of context as a barely recognizable claim . . . you can despair of the human race sometimes.