How the media should cover a crisis

A major function in media reporting is crisis coverage. It’s predictable, it follows patterns, and it’s reported in stages. Whenever a disaster happens, the public wants to be both in the know and kept up to date on all the events unfolding.

During a crisis, the public expects certain things to be reported, like stories of courage, death-defying events, people surviving against the odds, something being held accountable for a tragedy and an explanation of why it happened. The media outlets reporting on the tragedies don’t necessarily care about how accurate the information is that they are reporting on, they just care about getting information out there to pacify the hungry public.

There are three stages in crisis coverage. The first is to announce the crisis/disaster, to rush to the scene, and to interrupt programming. The second is to correct past errors, put the situation into perspective, and shape the political fallout. The third and final stage is to put the crisis into perspective and help people prepare for long range difficulties that will result from the crisis.

The first and second stages are arguably the most important out of all three. The first stage requires throwing information out to the public that may not be correct. The second stage involves fixing the errors made during the first stage. This is damaging because most people don’t follow up after the initial information is released.

There are different cases throughout history where initial media reports have been false and the general population never learned the correct facts. In June of 2016, Omar Mateen started shooting people in a Florida night club, killing 49 and wounding 58.

News reporters were quick to call him homophobic, on account of it being a gay night club that he targeted. As more information came to light, the public learned that Mateen had sworn his allegiance to ISIS, and that the U.S. killing of Abu Waheeb had triggered his rampage.

More evidence came out to suggest that the shooting had nothing to do with the fact that the patrons of the nightclub were gay. He had gone to two different night clubs before the one he actually started shooting in; he didn’t get in to the others because the security was too tight. He was also quoted asking where the women were when he got to the night club, which is another point of evidence to suggest that his motives in the shooting were not homophobia.

The general public does not know about the new evidence or the real reasons behind the shooting. Usually, the information that surfaces after the initial assumptions is not as dramatic or eye catching as the information first released. In the age of Twitter, sometimes the dramatic information released right after the tragedy happens gets many more retweets than the corrected information that comes out weeks later. This makes the initial information a more well-known fact than the more detailed facts that are revealed later.

To avoid this, we as the general population need to make sure we are not believing everything we see and immediately taking it as fact. We should always double and triple check information we receive, as well as the sources we get the information from.