December 2011
Transmitted by Television within the 24 Hours after the Quake
Takanobu Tanaka/Yumiko Hara
The Great East Japan Earthquake proved to be an unprecedented, broad-scale, complex disaster. How did each TV broadcaster report the situation that changed by the minute? In order to analyze the reported events and areas, the tendency of each station, as well as how reports were shifted according to time, the authors extract “minute-by-minute” scenes reported by NHK General TV and network commercial broadcasters based in Tokyo within the 24 hours after the main quake in order to encode the information delivered in the forms of images and sounds by attributes and characteristics. It was the first trial of its kind. 8,724 scenes telecast by six broadcasters were analyzed, from which structures of basic scenes, what information was transmitted by those images and sounds, and reported areas and zones were quantified.
Basic scenes included many on-the-spot live broadcasts, and it is worth noting that each broadcaster composed programs centering on those live broadcasts, especially immediately after the earthquake, when the tsunami kept attaching the coastal areas, and at the dawn on the following day. Furthermore, even at midnight, they employed on-the-spot broadcasts to report the nuclear accident and stranded workers in Tokyo, which indicates that remote broadcasts played an important role in reporting new developments without delay.
Regarding what kind of information was reported, the most-covered topic was “tsunami” both in images and sounds, followed by “rescuing disaster victims” in images and “earthquake (epicenter, intensity, etc.)” in sounds. As to whether the information on “lifeline damages,” which is difficult to visualize, should be also reported in TV broadcasts, even if it became voice information without images, the broadcasters’ decisions were split.
The total number of prefectures covered by the six stations was 23 in images and 32 in sounds. More precisely, Tokyo was covered most; one fourth of the reported images were about Tokyo, followed by Miyagi Prefecture (a little more than 20%) and Fukushima and Iwate Prefectures (a little more than 10%, respectively). In sounds, Miyagi and Fukusima surpassed Tokyo, and Iwate was reported less than Tokyo was.
Comparing the scales of damages in the reported and unreported areas, it is revealed that Ishinomaki City of Miyagi Prefecture suffered the severest damage but ranked merely 16th in images and 17th in sounds. Ootsuchi Chou and Yamada Machi of Iwate Prefecture as well as Yamamoto Chou of Miyagi Prefecture were also severely damaged but did not make the top 50 when it comes to the TV coverage. These results show that there was a “donut phenomenon” of information—an opposite effect that the information of worst affected areas was not fully covered.
In this research, only the information reported within the 24 hours after the initial quake were analyzed, but the authors plan to also look into the disaster coverage on the following days (March 12th and 13th) and continue examining specific reports and expressions by focusing on specific themes in the future.