“When you’re paying attention to the dead, you’re actually attending to the living,” said Onora Lien of King County Healthcare Coalition at a recent Association of Health Care Journalists conference.
This struck me as profound, even verged on leading to a mini-epiphany, given that I’ve never been on the inside of a major incident leading to mass casualties neither personally nor professionally.
Lien defined mass as anything that overwhelms the system that is in place. This means that 15 in a rural community is considered mass because it overwhelms the institutions that manage the dead like the medical examiner or funeral homes.
She also pointed out that it is important to understand that in many disasters that result in deaths, “unnatural” deaths are equivalent to homicides and will lead to an investigation. This means that the process of fatality management is complicated by the fact that each body is treated as a victim of a crime along with a crime scene.
Lien urged journalists to be sensitive to the complexities of fatality management. She reminded us throughout her presentation that the way death is managed affects overall how the community will recover from the disaster.
She suggested that we question ourselves on the following:
Framing of stories
What does it bring to the public to know how many are dead?
Are you extending the myth that all dead bodies lead to health hazards?
Understand the fluidity of body counts
Understand the complexity of identification and where it can go wrong, making sure to not release names too early (DNA, fingerprints, dental/ medical comparative tests, photo identification, visual identification are all part of the process of identification)
Is it best that officials make contact with families or journalists?
Although journalists may not be on the front line of dealing directly with deceased bodies, our roles contribute greatly in helping the living deal with the dead. This is an unexpected realization for me. One in which I am grateful for, because it has allowed me to understand my role as a journalist during and after disasters.
All Ebola, all the time
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Liberian journalist Wade C. L. Williams interviewing in the field.
That’s how HMJ’12 graduate Laura Smith described her health communications
work at the ...
This is an interesting post, especially in light of the recent events that took place here in Athens. I don't know that it could be described as a disaster equal to the ones mentioned in your post but it was still a similar process of erroneous reports and how the rumor mill can generate a lot of false information. And this idea that how death is managed can affect how a community picks itself up afterward is also incredibly relevant. On several occasions over the past weeks I've tried to put myself in the shoes of a local reporter and think about how I would go about covering this particular tragedy. It seems there is a balance somewhere in there but it certainly isn't always clearly defined.
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