With over 100,000 homes still sitting without power and extensive clean-up efforts underway, many on the east coast of Australia are reflecting on what the weeks ahead will look like in the wake of ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred.
But as the true extent of the damage remains unclear, coverage across the impact zones was anything but.
Australia’s major news networks provided wall-to-wall coverage as the weather system made landfall, documenting hour-by-hour updates of the conditions in Queensland and northern New South Wales.
As dozens of reporters were deployed across multiple locations, many online debated whether the coverage felt more like “disaster porn” than essential journalism.
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In this episode of The Briefing, Sacha Barbour Gatt speaks with Seven News Queensland’s Chief Reporter Katrina Blowers to discuss whether the treatment was ‘overkill’ or if it was paramount to the reporting of a rapidly evolving weather system.
Meme pages took like moths to a flame, with sites like Double Bay Today and Betoota Advocate finding humour in the volume of reporters boxes plastered across screens. Channel Nine notably had 12 reporters in the field in a single shot, with punters online arguing it was ‘too much’.
Katrina Blowers maintains that the number of reporters out in the field is likely not the issue and highlights the importance in covering an impact zone spanning hundreds of kilometres.
However, Blowers does question whether the spectacle has become a ‘cliche’.
In the past, live television crosses were done via satellite link. This technology was efficient in its ability to transfer an image, but unfortunately was at the mercy of network latency and cost.
With the introduction of mobile technology, reporter crosses became not only more viable, but a novelty that major networks liked to play up.
“We really wanted to show off that we had that technology,” Blowers says.
“We’ve obviously had a heap of conversations. Did we overcook this? Was this a fizzle? But honestly, now that we’ve seen the extent of the damage; people losing roofs, people getting flooded out, I don’t think we did.”