MediaChannel: Media Excluded from Tsunami Warning and They Don't Care

[emcguffie]

(I hope this hasn't already been posted. If so, sorry)


http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert364.shtml

The Media Are Excluded from Transmitting Tsunami Warnings, and They Don't Care

By Doug Carlson
MediaChannel.org

HONOLULU, April 29, 2005 -- The leader of a seminar I just attended told us it's our responsibility to help others take advantage of what we've learned in our professional lives. Here's some of what I learned while working in the media, in business and as a communications consultant:

To send a message to a mass population, you use the mass media. If the message is a matter of life or death, you mass communicate as urgently and efficiently as you can.

....<snip>

I've been looking into this question and writing about it on my weblog for the past four months, seemingly more or less by myself. With few exceptions, the media have been satisfied to report the standard explanations of why no warnings reached the region in time to save lives and have not attempted to go deeper.

Had they done so, they might have learned what the Center's director told me during my two-hour visit on March 25: The National Weather Service "won't allow" the Center to directly telephone the news media with a tsunami warning.

http://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert364.shtml

[Kagemusha]

1. Unfortunately, after the 4th paragraph something is missing...

If it's not in the original article, let me provide it.

Calling a nation's media with a tsunami warning when the government does not want to you is an extremely hostile act. Let's not pretend governments would rather panic their entire tourist industries rather than lose a few people to a tsunami once every century. Or that governments want their media to be connected to the US government in a way that sets them up for fake warnings if the US government wants a fake warning sent. While these reasons are probably not good enough for ordinary people, we are dealing with proud, loud and paranoid foreign governments here, not ordinary people. And that is why the NWS won't allow the Center to directly telephone the news media: other nations have made clear they will not stand for it.