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Disaster by NumbersIf the earthquake doesn't kill you, the clichés will.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, May 13, 2008, at 12:42 PM ET

In the wake of a devastating earthquake in central China on Monday, the news media have wheeled out their trusted architecture for the disaster story. After a devastating earthquake rocked Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in late May 2006, Jack Shafer lamented the inability of most journalists to elude the gaping jaws of cliché in reporting on natural disasters. The article is reprinted below.

Write your own clichéd caption about the Indonesia earthquake Click image to expand.

The earth pukes fire and breaks apart. Its oceans dispatch tsunamis, and the heavens, oh the heavens, churn like an intestinal disorder, flinging skyscrapers of water upon the coasts. Winds and floods scrape the land clean of buildings, bridges, and people.

Water schemes with earth to make mud, which spreads over the dead and half-dead like skanky chocolate frosting. Man-made mayhem curses us, too—shipwrecks, fires, plane crashes, derailments, pileups, and cave-ins.

To these scenes comes the journalist—if he hasn't already staked out the territory. With pen, camera, or microphone in hand, he struggles briefly against cliché to document the suffering and mop-up but always surrenders because the disaster-news template defies renovation. Audiences know what they want from the disaster-news genre—a blink of horror before the sports scores and then maybe a longer gaze later—and the press gives it to them.

Saturday's earthquake in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, killed about 6,200, and it got its standard one- or two-day ride on the front pages of American dailies before moving inside. In every regard, the continuing coverage conforms to the disaster-news formula revealed by Alexander Cockburn for [More] magazine three decades ago in "Death Rampant! Readers Rejoice" (December 1973).

The only dated element of Cockburn's piece is his observation that American media remain ashamed of disaster coverage, unlike the British press. Since his piece appeared, we've closed the embarrassment gap with our 24-hour news networks, our minicams, our cheap satellites, our never-sleep Web sites, and our color newspaper presses. Cockburn's earthquake template demands:

Quick comparisons with other earthquakes. Secondly, where is it? Usually in "remote Eastern Turkey" or in the "arid center of Iran." But with luck it will have occurred in marginally more accessible Latin or Central America. Good chance for post facto description. Most of the buildings destroyed; others leaning at crazy angles. Constant flood of refugees. People clawing at rubble. Survivors crawling, blinking into the light of day. Preliminary tremors, then "for six seconds the earth shook." Make sure to get picture of one building standing (usually a church in Roman Catholic countries or a mosque in Muslim ones.) Get interviews from American survivors. Animadvert on general danger of earthquakes, particularly in San Francisco area. Most important of all: get casualty figures and escalate them each day. Remind people that 200,000 people died in the Lisbon earthquake.

In Cockburn's manual, slow-moving killers such as famine, disease, tribal genocide, or automotive holocaust (approximate 42,000 killed a year in the U.S.) rarely qualify for disaster coverage because quickness of death is the genre's distinguishing characteristic. Hell today, gone tomorrow, in other words—or at least gone from sight.

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
Photograph of Indonesian earthquake rubble by Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty Images.
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