A television correspondent, still wearing a radiation detection badge on his lapel, had important news to convey to a worried woman in the United States. “This is Bill Weir with ABC News. I’m actually in northern Japan right now, and I just saw your sister Elsa and she’s O.K., and she wanted you to know that, and that she loves you.”
The TV Watch
Pillar of Relief Coverage: Americans Reconnected With Anxious Families
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: March 15, 2011
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Ann Curry of NBC News was filmed anxiously showing quake survivors a picture of a missing American teacher, Canon Purdy. Later, Ms. Curry hit gold. “I found your sister,” she announced over a satellite phone in front of the rescue center where the teacher had sought refuge. “Here she is.” As she handed the phone to Ms. Purdy, the screen split between the teacher crying into the telephone and her equally weepy and joyful relatives who were being recorded by a camera crew in San Francisco.
Reunions orchestrated by correspondents have become a staple of disaster coverage, but it’s particularly noticeable in the television reporting now, at a time when the crisis in Japan is so acute and so many other trouble zones are competing for air time. Amid all those horrifying images from Japan of death and destruction and the ominous threat of a nuclear reactor meltdown, viewers hunger for a glimpse of hope and miraculous rescue. And networks and cable news channels are staging their own productions — corralling the families back in the United States, timing phone calls and framing the moments for maximum emotional impact. On “CBS Evening News” on Tuesday, the correspondent Lucy Craft was shown hugging her 17-year-old son, a boarding-school student in Sendai who had been out of touch for two days.
So far, most of the television coverage of the tsunami has been intense, thorough and far-reaching, with correspondents reporting around the clock from the worst-stricken areas. These reunion tableaus are touching and also a little troubling — another example of how entertainment values bleed into news coverage.
The number of Americans caught up in what Mr. Weir described as “an apocalyptic hellscape” is small. No casualties have yet been reported by the State Department or the Pentagon; their news value is secondary to their poignancy.
Young Americans suddenly reconnected with their anxious families serve as proxies for Japanese survivors whose searches cannot be facilitated by foreigners and whose anguish doesn’t always translate vividly enough for American television. These miniature portraits of survival allow viewers, helplessly watching clip after clip of devastation, to feel like something is being done. Most of all, these tender scenes serve as a response to the accusation, stated or not, that television is a vampire of tragedy, feeding on suffering and despair for ratings.
Anchors have been known to personalize their stories since the days of Walter Cronkite. But particularly in the hours and days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when reporters stepped up to help families search for missing loved ones, television cast itself as a pillar of the relief effort, on the scene to offer aid and comfort as well as reports on the damage. After Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, some television crews reached stranded storm victims before the police or rescue crews, and kept their cameras rolling as they lifted terrified Louisianans to safety. The earthquake in Haiti last year provided similar scenes and opportunities, including vignettes scored to music.
But reunions run the risk of turning into a cliché of disaster reporting. The NBC anchor Brian Williams on Monday seemed almost sardonic when he asked Ms. Curry a follow-up question: “Can you tell me how on earth ordinary Japanese citizens, without the help of nice people from American television networks, are going to find their loved ones they believe to be missing and not dead?”
That day, the CNN correspondent Soledad O’Brien triumphantly presented a 25-year-old American teacher, Paul Fales, who had not been heard from since the tsunami hit on Friday. She presided over his first phone call to his parents back in Michigan, adjusting his earpiece and at times appearing to prompt him to loosen his Midwestern reserve. “Now you, of course, know that if you’re seeing panicking, people who are overseas, your parents namely, also panicking because they had no word from you,” Ms. O’Brien told the teacher. “This is really the first time.”
“Hi,” Mr. Fales said calmly into a satellite phone. “How are you? We really miss you,” his father replied jovially, as if his son were calling home from college and not from the worst disaster Japan has endured since World War II.
The Fales’s reunion was less emotive than most, and all the more striking for not meeting the expectations of those who exert themselves to capture such moments. The appetite for those is apparently endless. On Tuesday the ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos urged worried viewers to contact “Good Morning America,” saying, “We’d like to reunite you with any missing family members.”
People used to mock network newscasts for pandering to viewers with “news you can use” features about diets and electricity bills. In a disaster, television offers a lot, including news anchors you can use.