More from behind the scenes of the TV coverage from around the web:
Citing Steve Harrigan’s emotional moment on Fox News yesterday, NYTimes’ Brian Stelter writes “Amid banner headlines and hours of television coverage, reporters and anchors struggled to convey the enormousness of the devastation in Haiti on Thursday, as the world’s news media directed their collective attention to the crippled country.”
One of those anchors, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, describes some of what he’s seen as “truly a pretty horrific situation.”
“The thing that’s difficult about this is that the camera lens is too small to capture what is really happening here,” he told the Huffington Post. “It’s too small to capture the scale, the size, the horror of what’s happening here. It’s a very tiny little camera lens, and no matter where you point it something is happening.”
Cooper was closely involved in his network’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina and CNN and others seem to be relying on a bank of knowledge garnered during coverage of some past disasters, like Katrina or the 2004 tsunami, in covering the earthquake.
“Coverage this week has been informed by those experiences,” writes THR’s Paul Gough. “TV journalism learned during Katrina that prepositioning everything from TV equipment to trucks to meals-ready-to-eat was crucial. Networks drew upon their stores in the early hours of the Haitian earthquake, and established connection points in Miami and the Dominican Republic as well as Port-au-Prince.”
Gough also estimates that “costs for all of the networks combined could be in the range of $5 million or more” to cover the Haiti issue.