Chennai rain coverage exposes limitations of National TV

What’s happened to National TV?

For two days Chennai has been marooned, and there are heroic efforts being made by the residents, NGOs and administration to rescue people in trouble. But what have we been seeing on National TV?

A few flooded roads, aircraft standing in water, some shots of residents trying to reach safety, some images of submerged cars, and once in a while rescue boats carrying people.

The coverage, for the last two days, has been very superficial. The TV reporters and anchors have been telling us repeatedly that Chennai was drowning. But the images did not indicate the scale of the disaster.

How much of Chennai was under water? Was it limited to low-lying areas only? Or was the main town and upmarket areas also marooned? It was hard to get a sense from what was being shown on National TV, especially the English language channels.

We were being told repeatedly that the streets are flooded, that lakes are overflowing, that water has entered into homes. But the images did not give a sense of how bad the situation was.

The reporters and the camera crew seemed to be shooting from safe areas. There was little effort to venture into localities that faced the main brunt of flooding.

It was only this afternoon that one got a real sense of the calamity. TV crews boarded IAF choppers that were pressed into service to drop food packets.

The aerial shots  shook you. Street after street was under water. You wondered how the people were coping. Most single storied homes were literally submerged. There were no roads, only rivers of flowing water.

Later in the evening you saw images of army jawans trying to open a gate on a flooded street. The TV crew was also on this army boat, and the reporter raised his hand to touch the overhead  electricity wires.  This gave you an idea as to how deep the water was.

The question is: Why did the National TV fail to show the scale of the tragedy for the first two days? Why did they wake up only on the third day?

In fact, there were better pictures on Twitter. Here’s one that was put out by a resident with the Twitter handle Notthatengineer@ValarMorkali:

Gaps in coverage

After watching the TV coverage, one cannot but wonder as to how well are our TV teams equipped to cover such calamities? Some of the questions that come to mind are:

1. Why was there no map to show which parts of Chennai are flooded? How deep was the water in different localities?
2. Why did the cameramen avoid climbing on buildings and take aerial views of the flooding? Or venture into areas tht were heavily flooded?
3. What about electricity? That’s generally the first casualty in flooding. But nobody knew which localities had power.
4. The same was true of communications. No one knew if the mobile phones were working or not.
5. We were told that a hospital had to be evacuated. But barring one picture of a woman in wheelchair we did not see any other pictures. Why were there no shots of the hospital being evacuated?
6. There was considerable coverage of the airport, where we were told 700 travellers were stranded. But what about the railway station? Thousands must have been stranded there. Did the water enter the station? One doesn’t know.
7. What about relief shelters? There were no shots of homes or schools or shelters where the rescued had been taken.
8. What about officials or NGOs who we were told repeatedly are working to reduce the misery of the people? Why were they not being interviewed to give an accurate situation of the flooding?
9. Why were there so few interviews of people who have been rescued? Or of rescuers?

There were so many gaps in the coverage.

To make matters worse, the TV channels instead of pushing their reporters and cameramen to report better were busy asking their Internet desks to report the coverage of the tragedy by Social Media.

This coverage was undoubtedly better.  Chennairains.org certainly deserves to be congratulated. It is not clear who set up this crowdsourced site. But it gave information that mattered. Maybe, the TV channels should have used their resources and networks to set up such a useful site instead of just trying to repeat the same shots again and again.

The spirit of Chennai

The spirit of Chennai was best summed up by Journalist Darlington Jose Hector who shared the following lines on Facebook:

It’s raining in Chennai.
And it’s not just the skies that have opened up…

Many homes are letting in water, but quite a few are letting in guests.

The First floors are embracing the Ground floors.

Malls are welcoming footfalls, and that too without wallets.

Movie halls are counting box office numbers differently.

Hotels are giving out foods that aren’t leftovers for a change.

Marriage halls are solemnizing more marriages of souls than ever before.

Social Walls are tearing down their Civil counterparts.

140 characters are travelling faster than a ‘108’.

Taxi services are plying boats, MTC buses are plying like taxis.

Religious differences are being doused in a relentless downpour.

Politicians are knee deep in water and politics has sunk.

But Leaders are being born at every waterlogged junction.

Soldiers are being born at every dangerous turn.

And humans are being born at every deserving instance.

It’s raining in Chennai.
And it’s not just the skies that have opened up.

Surely, the national TV needs to do a rethink as to how it should have covered the Chennai rains,

Note: The coverage improved from the afternoon of December 3. Probably some of the criticism on social media sunk in.