Kerala - Kannur   

Call to prepare guidelines on reporting disasters

KANNUR: The media should emphasise community perspective and gender sensitivity while reporting disasters, according to media experts and aid workers.

A two-day workshop on ‘Media intervention in management of disasters’ that concluded here on Sunday stressed the importance of the media’s role in disaster management. The workshop, organised by the Kerala Union of Working Journalists (KUWJ) in association with the Revenue Department and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), concluded with the release of a guideline that demands high responsibility and perspective of news reporters, while reporting disasters.

Speaking on the inter-dependency between government agencies and the media in times of disasters, T.V. Varghese, representing a non-governmental aid agency, said that information generation and information sharing were important factors while dealing with disasters. He said that the media worked as an interface between the government and the public. In the post-disaster phase, the media would play an advocacy role, help resource mobilisation and increase accountability in government measures, he added.

Observing that the media generally gave more importance to post-disaster phases, UNDP project officer Ajith Chacko said that pre-disaster risk management should be highlighted by the media.

Stating that disaster management was a systematic and scientific approach, he said that community should become the centre stage of disaster management. Local response to disasters was most important, he said.

Stressing the need for empowering the community for disaster management, Mr. Chacko said that post-disaster discourse of horror and grief, expression of empathy, accounts of heroes and final discourse of anger continued to be the pattern of disaster reporting in the media.

He also called for a guideline to be prepared by the media community for reporting different categories of disasters.

Media experts who participated in the workshop called upon government agencies to provide correct information to the media during disasters. The guidelines released by KUWJ State general secretary N. Padmanabhan called for a dialogue between the media community and disaster managers as the media were a main component of disaster management.

Stressing the need to avoid sensationalism while reporting disasters, the guidelines also urged media persons to respect the privacy of the victims of disasters. The workshop also called for special training for journalists in reporting disasters.

KUWJ State president P.P. Sasindran, vice-president K. Kunhikannan and Mathrubhumi Deputy Editor T. Suresh Babu were among those who spoke at the workshop.

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