June 16, 2008 6:38PM

Covering a Disaster

By FOXBusiness.com

This is my first blog.
Blog, who came up with that name, blog, blogging, blogger.

Anyway, natural disasters are tough stories. Hard to navigate, hard to be fully accurate and extremely easy to blow out of proportion. The weather events in the Midwest may have real influence on the price of food, American exporting, railroad shipping and not to mention truck shipping because virtually all the roads in the region west are impassable. Oh, yeah, and if the trucker has to go 300 miles out of his way then he pays about $1,400 more than he normally would have. Not good.

Television is in every sense the micro of the macro, so the lens shows only what the photographer wants to give. My point is that I am trying to make sure that our viewers understand the micro…that not every town in Iowa and Illinois is devastated by flood waters or have been hammered by winds and hail. Of course, many of them have and there are plenty of people who have worked there whole dog gone lives only to see it washed away by a storm. I mean, that’s bad luck, right? No, no luck in natural disasters, just being near one is a catastrophe for anyone involved.

All disasters ring of a certain tone, they have character traits inherent to tough times:
-Suffering
-Anxiety
-Despair
-Laughter
-Hope
-Anger

Really, a roller coaster on the human emotions. All Natural Disasters also share another similar trait, people seem to forget about them once they are done gawking at the television and telling their friends and family things like, “how bad it must be to be that guy who lost his house in the flood waters,” or “we should really do something to help those people out on the television.”

So, allow me to finally make my point. Journalists need to be careful and accurate about what they say, show and infer. And one last thought, all natural disasters affect local, regional and national economies in some fashion. Next week, the Taco shells you buy at the grocer may be up by 5-10%, are you going to notice and if you do, will you think that the inflation came from the flooding in the Midwest? Look into it.

-Robert Ray