The same can be said for the coverage of the floods in Australia, where reporters from news outlets like San Francisco Chronicle and AOL News used local publications like The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald. But most of the similarities in coverage between Brazil and Australia stop there. While reporters did due diligence, keeping readers informed of the death toll in Queensland, there was more coverage on the economic impact of the floods. A typical article at Bloomberg News, for instance, reported that:
“One of the biggest casualties is likely to be our coal exports, with many mines shut down in big coal mining regions like the Bowen Basin, and supply chains severely hampered,” [Federal Treasurer Wayne] Swan said…
The cost to the nation of the clean up and rebuilding may be as much as $20 billion ($19.8 billion), economists forecast.
Bloomberg Businessweek and Reuters both ran a series of articles exploring
the potential impact the floods will have on the farming industry in Queensland, and what the government can do to alleviate the situation. The Wall Street Journal covered how the banks will deal with the flood costs and wrote about how the floods might affect the labor pool in the area. A handful of news outlets had some insightful commentary on how the farmers will respond to these floods. For example, The New York Times’s Aubrey Belford reported that:
While some farmers may leave the land because of the floods, the bigger threat in the longer term is still likely to be a lack of water, said Chris Cocklin, an environmental scientist who is the deputy vice chancellor of James Cook University in Queensland. Before the start of heavy rains late last year, a drought had persisted for more than a decade across the Murray-Darling Basin, a vast irrigated river system in eastern Australia that is the country’s most important agricultural area. In many areas, it would take years of significant rain to bring underground aquifers up to healthy levels, Dr. Cocklin said.
Nice depth. But even more impressive were reporters who branched out and compared the two natural disasters. Juxtaposing two distinct events like this is not easy, but most journalists who attempted to do so handled the task well. Comparisons can very quickly become misleading for a reader, preventing them from understanding each situation separately. We saw this happen with the Haiti-Katrina coverage a few years ago, but the coverage was better this time. According to an insightful article by Alexei Barrineuvo in The New York Times:
Disaster experts say that the stark difference in the death tolls in Brazil and Australia, where at least 28 people have died in flooding in the northeast in the past two weeks, reveal a wide gap in the preparedness of the countries and their flood management policies.
“In a country like Brazil, which is not a poor country, where technological expertise and resources are really not a problem, large numbers of people dying from floods is not a good sign,” Dr. Sapir said. What Brazil lacks, she said, are “the political will and the priority that public authorities must give to the issue of flood management.”
It’s this type of reporting that adds complexity to these types of events, especially when few reporters reach past the obvious. We wish that we could have seen more, but the impact of these disasters are still unfolding, so perhaps the best reportage is yet to come.
Many questions are still left unanswered. What are the problems the victims in Rio might face, beyond finding new housing? Is there going to be a risk of disease outbreaks in both countries? Can economic policies be adapted in Australia? Can housing policies improve in Brazil? Reporters did a good job prioritizing angles coverage in the immediate aftermath the disasters, and we hope that they will now address these lingering concerns, which will be vital to the recovery of all those affected, and to preparations for the next time that calamity strikes.
And of course, some, like the SciDev.Net, have covered the scientific issues surrounding the mudslides in Brazil: http://bit.ly/ge79RH
#1 Posted by Mico Tatalovic, CJR on Wed 26 Jan 2011 at 02:43 PM
Excellent point, Mico, thanks for the link. SciDev.net consistently produces insightful science coverage from around the world. Nothing quite like it.
#2 Posted by Curtis Brainard, CJR on Wed 26 Jan 2011 at 03:37 PM
And the contemporaneous floods in Sri Lanka that washed a million people out of their homes? Not a mention because there weren't enough compelling pictures from such a remote place.
#3 Posted by Pat Rourke, CJR on Wed 26 Jan 2011 at 09:24 PM
The effects of the Australian floods in Queensland, New south Wales and Victoria are on a scale never experienced here before. Unimaginable amounts of rain were falling in Australia, Sri Lanka, South East Asia, Brasil, Italy, parts of Russia and South Africa At the same time, deep snow froze the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Europe, China, Russia, Canada and America.
After nearly a decade of drought and terrible bush(brush) fires, most of Queensland, a state nearly twice the land area of Texas, has been flooded.
These formally rare and often isolated natural disasters are now frequent and world wide.
I don't remember the Main Stream Media covering the Noah affair at the time but it has been widely written about since, in other publications. They missed a good story. Editorial pressures had staff concentrating on social entertainment, marriage coverage and engagement parties. The rest of the coverage was on the military wars and law and order issues concerning the then endemic violence. I think R Murdoch was a copy boy then.
#4 Posted by james fingleton wild, CJR on Wed 26 Jan 2011 at 11:51 PM
Sorry to post again. Just checked a source who confirmed Mr Rupert Murdoch as having held an apprenticeship being indentured by the printer. Copy boy was his job description but his official title was the printer's apprentice.
Local oral history has him coining the phrases 'Publish and be damned' and 'the devils in the detail'. He was reported to have referred to himself ( in the capacity of a media publisher) as the devil' advocate when applied to political reporting.
#5 Posted by james fingleton wild, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 12:40 AM
The Australian story not covered in the main stream US press was the part in the disaster played by mismanagement of the system of dams intended for both flood control and water storage. The blogsphere had some good coverage of this aspect.
The Rio mudslides are a sad part of Latin American socio-political dysfunction. My wife and I saw the same thing, albeit with less loss of life, year after year in the Dominican Republic -- the poor live on land not suited to home building, flood plains or .critical slopes, in sub-standard housing. When the rains come, as they always eventually do, waters rise quickly and hillsides slide down.
#6 Posted by Kip Hansen, CJR on Fri 28 Jan 2011 at 07:22 PM