There are a couple of articles (which I only noticed via Stuart Hughes website) on Media Guardian attacking and defending the BBC’s coverage of the Asian Tsunami.
Here’s the attacking piece by The Guardian’s Matt Wells, and here’s the rebuttal by the BBC’s Head of News Roger Mosey (both articles require free registration to read).
As a viewer stuck in a non-digital world as the story broke on boxing day, I’m not quite as critical as Matt Wells, but I wouldn’t say that the coverage was perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
I certainly disagree that the BBC should absolutely have to get their star reporters jetting onto the scene with any kind of urgency. The BBC did have local correspondents in place around the area and since they live and work there, they’re in a strong position to carry out the reporting duties. Cerainly they need back up from London in terms of additional people and there’s no reason not to send people out, but star names are not what’s needed for understanding the situation – just clear reporting.
Private Eye still has its regular “Live From” box highlighting needless two-ways carried out between the studio and the local reporter on the ground. I wouldn’t say that sending people to a disaster area is pointless, but there seems to be little need to host the news from the local area. More importance is placed on this than is really necessary.
I do think that the Christmas schedules did mean that it was hard for viewers to find out what was going on in the region with reduced length bulletins planned. Many of these were extended, and some more programming should have been dropped as the scale became clear, but I think that’s a wider malaise of the broadcasting industry who seem to think that nothing really important ever happens at Christmas (There were some elections in the Ukraine which would have received wider attention had there been the airtime available, and I imagine that various other things were happening throughout the UK, but you’d have been hard pushed to learn about them on national TV).
Overall, I’d say that they could have done better, but it wasn’t that bad.