Death Alive: The Challenges of Live Reporting On Disasters and Tragedies

Abstract

Given that recordings of wars, terrorist attacks, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and other tragic andcatastrophic events have become commonplace and ubiquitous in the modern mediated world, this paperquestions the importance and role of the media as a mediator in distributing these recordings to thepublic. The role of the media in providing credible information in situations of crisis is very important,but also difficult, especially when it comes to live reporting, when there is no possibility to control thesituation and when no one can know whether we will see death or hear it live. The paper uses a casestudy of two regional news televisions (N1 and Al Jazeera Balkans) reporting on the earthquake inPetrinja (Croatia), to show the weight of dilemmas and challenges that a journalist faces when heexperiences, sees, and records a tragic event, and must report about it immediately - ethically,professionally and objectively. The aim of the paper is therefore to point out the reality of the journalisticprofession in which sometimes, not with the intention of relativizing journalistic objectivity, there maystill be a gap between ideals and practice.

Keywords

• media
• earthquake
• ethics
• live reporting
• journalists