Disaster Reporting Quotes

Frightening media messages...pervade the news business, which really ought to be called "the bad news business" for its preoccupation with disaster and destruction. In broadcast journalism, killing is almost always covered, while kindness is almost always ignored. The more alarming a news item is, the more attention it receives.

CNN was one of the first news organizations in the world to train and equip its journalists before deploying them to dangerous areas.

A first hint of the power of the electronic media to bring disaster directly into living rooms came with the radio broadcast of the explosion of the zeppelin "Hindenburg," in 1937 . . .

I covered Katrina, I've covered the tsunamis, all of them, the Haiti earthquake... you get to a certain point in your career where you say, 'I want to now cover what I want to cover.'

The best newspapermen I know are those most thrilled by the daily pump of city room excitements; they long fondly for a good murder; they pray that assassinations, wars, catastrophes break on their editions.

What is perhaps more worthy of note than how many tsunami dead we've seen, however, is how many other recent dead we have not seen.

News reports following a natural disaster are almost always dominated by stories of looting and violence, but in many cases such stories turn out to be unfounded speculations based on rumour.

If you look at photojournalism, it's largely driven by current events... always chasing a crisis or disaster. I follow a narrative that is much looser than current events.

Two subsequent incidents of import established CNN: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, which CNN was the only network to cover as it happened, and the 1991 Gulf War, which CNN chronicled round the clock from a proximity as irresistible as it was alarming, bomb blasts and gunfire lighting up TV screens from coast to coast.

As a comedian, I'm like one of those on-the-scene reporters. I will actually go and try to find disasters so I can write jokes as the disasters unfold.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when It's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it.

I've covered tornadoes and other natural disasters. I wasn't on the ground for Katrina. But as our helicopter descended toward Mexico Beach, I just saw an entire town gone. Leveled, with the exception of a condo still standing here and there.

Coal mines make the news only when they explode, collapse, kill. It's exciting! Tragedy! Fodder for a cable-news frenzy.

I have gas mask in my office because I took Chem/bio warfare training class so I can report in case of an attack. It’s on a copy of my head made by Madame Tussauds

'Potato-chip news' is news that's repetitive, requires little effort to absorb, and is consumable in massive quantities: true crime, natural disasters, political punditry, celebrity gossip, sports gossip, or endless photographs of beautiful houses, food, or clothes.

By far my most perilous assignment was covering a tank car explosion.

Bloggers and other flavors of lone wolf are publishing heart-wrenching photo-essays from the front line of the recovery effort. Newspapers and TV networks? They're writing about the temperature of the water in some part (they don't specify which) of some damaged reactor, illustrating it with video screen grabs of machinery they don't understand enough to explain.

We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more, but the number is roughly constant, and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally, the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.

The bad news is that 50 people died in a hotel fire; the good news is that we got exclusive footage.