Witnessing the Human Cost of Climate Change

Panelists: Argaw Ashine, director of the Ethiopian Environment Journalists Association, Roosevelt Jean-Francois, of the Haitian grassroots media group CECOCIDA and John Pope, of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Read an article about this panel here.
Listen to full audio of this panel and Q&A session here.
Read a transcript of John Pope's presentation from this panel here.

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John Pope: "After Katrina rumours were running wild and our brave colleagues who stayed in New Orleans had to make sense of it. Our police chief was repeating anything that was told him. And there were stories of babies being bayoneted, of people being killed every night. So our team looked into all of those allegations, which was not easy given the difficulty of communication. Yet, we published a frontpage story saying in essence, 'Hey, these didn’t happen.' The next day he was gone.

“There was a lot of interest in New Orleans among the people who were far away. And so we were reporting to let people know who have evacuated, part of our diaspora, what is going on. And what was really cool was what came out on our website. People we were setting themselves up on our website, like I am in this part of New Orleans, if you are reading this on NOLA.com let me know where your house is, and I will go and check on it. And so we became some sort of message, board and trying to make sense of what was going on. And also, people who were coming in out of town were repeating whatever they were told without having and sources to check with, and that was part of our job.”

Question from audience: “Going along the lines that you just mentioned about being a member of the community and also being a journalist, did you ever find yourself caught in a situation where you had to compromise your professional responsibility as a journalist with the moral obligation of being caught in the catastrophe?”

John Pope: “Never, and I am not being self-righteous here. I felt that the two were identical. This was not an example of boosterism, just mindless chauvinism. We were trying to get to the truth of what had happened, we were trying to understand what had gone on to make some sort of sense of it. That means that we were part of the community, sure, but we were also reporters and those roles actually worked together very well.”

Gavin Rees: “In traumatic situations, everybody’s reaction is different, but there are certain patterns of responses that individuals have. In the middle of a disaster somebody might be hyper-alert or very wired. They might get a tunnel vision when they can only see certain things and miss other things that are happening around them. They may have intrusive images, images of the threat of the car crash, of the gun, constantly re-appearing in their mind.

“And these are natural adjustments that a human being may really need to function in a conflict situation or a traumatic situation – it doesn’t mean that they are going to be impaired by them.

“Just as somebody on the ground can have a trauma reaction, so can national media have a trauma reaction. One of the paradoxes of these situations is that very often the most accurate reporters were the reporters on the ground trying to cover the story. They were using their sense that their job really mattered to overcome those personal tunneling reactions.

“However, the rest of the world’s media was also having a trauma reaction, and so this is maybe why in Katrina, you have this ridiculous, over-inflated reporting, these rumours that were circulating around that small babies were being raped in the Superdome and that there was looting on every single street corner. The idea that people had descended into some feral state of madness was the same in Haiti.

“And so who is objective? A lot of the media, who were working outside in nice, comfortable studios were also going through some kind of trauma process. We all saw this on 9/11 and the Twin Towers: how the first reaction was to imagine that the fatality rates must be absolutely enormous and then over a few days they all came down, and that is a natural, or at least a frequent response.”

Nathan Witkop, DW Environment Correspondent: “I was wondering if you could give some concrete examples about how you went about confirming that something didn’t happen in such an extreme environment. Presumably people who have fled or they are not answering their phones, or they are in a remote community and so who do you actually speak to confirm things?”

John Pope: “Well, I had built up a network of sources. I had been writing about medicine for about 20 years before Katrina struck and I had a network of sources and their cellphone numbers. If they had evacuated, I was able to get to them and I was able to run-down rumours that I had been hearing. I had been hearing stories about diphtheria, typhoid, stuff that just was not true.

“The state epidemiologist, a wonderful man named Dr. Raoult Ratard‚ he looks like Santa Claus and sounds like Hercule Poirot and was just wonderful about this, because he was as eager to get the message out also.

“That’s what I did. For two months I felt like the man who sweeps up after the elephants at the circus [i.e. the national and international reporters coming in from outside.] I was saying in essence, just calm down.

“A crisis is no time to be making new friends. You need to establish your sources as you go along and get their cellphone numbers and that is how you get to them.

Roosevelt Jean-Francois: “For a short time in Haiti, it was impossible for 24, 48 hours to confirm information. With Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, with the social media, this was the only way, because all the cellphones went down and the main telephone company was not working. But the internet was working in some places.

“But to use MySpace or Facebook, you must have a network, and so the network is the most important thing.

“The second thing is that you have to go with the local journalists. And I do agree with Gavin; for you don’t discover a place in crisis; you discover a place before. You should have someone who knows people, who knows where to go, who knows what to do to help you. Even if you are from Haiti, to go in a lot of places is not easy.

“And the third thing is to have relationships with local authorities, because you have to attribute the information. There was a lot of disinformation and misunderstanding during the very first day.

“One question: how many people have been killed. When we are reporting about number, who to attribute 200,000 people killed. Who said that? We challenged the Prime Minister, who said that number: 'How do you know about this?' After three weeks you will have more information than you had before. It is a continuing and very difficult process."