Media gets tired too

By: Stanley Palisada

News media today is the most fatigue-stricken on earth nowadays. With the developing war in the middle east compounded by natural calamities over in Japan and New Zealand in the past few weeks, news teams are driven to exhaustion and news finances, to premature depletion.

Deploying reporters to other countries successively during the first quarter of 2011 is largely unplanned. It’s true that news networks set up provisions for the unknown, as news media is in the business of breaking stories. But who would ever think crises of various magnitudes would hit different regions of the world almost simultaneously, as if on cue? Even major networks CNN and ABC (both sufficiently-backed, financially) have already hinted that the tsunami of global events recently are getting a tad costly for financial comfort, and equally taxing to journalists.

And if these global networks are harping exhaustion, how much more the Philippine news media whose budget and might, are just a fraction of what giant networks have at their disposal?

Three months into the year and the country’s networks are already griping over costly deployments and newsrooms feel like it’s been dumped with a year’s worth of coverage.
And 2011 is far from over. The La Nina enhanced typhoon season in the coming quarter is sure to bring damage and desperation to our countrymen that coverage alone would require sizable resources already. Who knows what else lies ahead? Another Ondoy?

This early PHIVOLCS—inspired by the Japan experience—has also revived talks on how an intense quake similar to Japan’s, could bring the Philippines to its knees. Our very own “big one” shall reap casualties in the hundreds of thousands—and covering all that human misery is a chilling outlook for news media (knock on wood).

While the Philippines is not smack in the middle of the recent killer quakes, waves, and wars for the moment, we are still affected by every world problem via collateral damage. Filipinos are an omnipresent people and it’s highly likely that every nook and cranny of this planet has a Filipino in it. By and large, the costs of chasing stories to the ends of the earth are higher than the GDP’s of Batanes.

Hence catastrophic events outside our land can either reap Filipino victims or Filipinos waiting to be saved—either way, media covers. If a tragedy or war strikes Saudi Arabia for instance, evacuating about a million OFW’s is a humongous problem for the government and a major production for news networks.

That kind operation is like saving an entire city with the sheer number of lives at stake as the number of Filipinos in Saudi Arabia is even greater than the population of some of our cities. In Libya and Egypt alone when OFW’s had to be evacuated news teams covering the exodus of Filipinos, racked up fare, hotel, food and miscellaneous expenses running in the millions.

But more overwhelming than cost of news, is a tragedy’s toll on man himself. When an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, news media again penetrated the ruined and radioactive cities not just to look for Filipinos and their stories. Media played rescuer and gave hope, by providing assistance to the confused, the desperate and the trapped.

Next to the Department of Foreign Affairs, it is in media that OFW’s seek during desperate times. Just like government, the job of media goes beyond the coverage—as it offers public service. Panicking relatives of Filipinos come to media for both information and assistance especially when they cannot rely on government for these.

Lastly, news media’s job comes with more risks than ever. In the Japan coverage safety concerns over radiation from damaged nuclear plants in Fukushima exposed reporters to new threats such as radiation contamination. In Libya news media could get caught in the crossfire, or targeted just like everyone else.

Amid all these, journalists need debriefing. As human beings, no journalist (no matter how veteran or cynical) leaves the coverage unaffected by the traumatic experiences he had to witness, and tell about.

Debriefing allows people on the ground to talk about their experiences to experts such as psychologists who can help them process their feelings towards these experiences. Debriefing also readies the journalist for yet another tragic, breaking news story--which by recent experience--could come any moment.