Reporting disasters minus context serves entrenched interests

Media products work to compel audience attention, to entertain and create lasting impressions as well as produce negative reactions from viewers . When covering disasters journalists select news angles and visual images which they assume will compel audience attention. For example news on the Dzivarasekwa bus disaster featured scenes of destruction, chaos, visuals of the damaged bus, train. These became the basic themes of the disaster coverage in the state press. But there was very little said on the antecedents of this crisis or about what it meant to the society other than it being simply a horrific occurrence.

There was no attempt to locate the event within its larger social political and economic context. For example, it wouldn't it be more revealing and informationally enriching to provide context by providing a trend chart to show whether our roads and rails are becoming safer places or more dangerous and try to find explanations for the patterns? What was the situation before? What has changed? How does this link up with the general economic hardships the country faces in the wake of economic sanctions? Could this be just one example of how economic sanctions are hurting the ordinary people? Is it traceable to bad governance and poor economic policies?

There was nothing said on the impact of the bus disaster on the Dzivarasekwa residents or the long-term economic outcomes on household incomes. This does not mean that journalists should avoid reporting the terrible human occurrences. The problem arises when these are the only themes in the coverage and they become routinised and shorn of any context each time there is a similar disaster .

By John Sibanda, PgDip in Media and Society Studies student, MSU.