November 2014
Transnational Disasters, Transboundary Disaster Reporting
Takanobu Tanaka
In August 2014, Re-Visionary Interpretations of the Public Enterprise (RIPE@2014), was convened in Tokyo as its first conference held in Asia. Under the grand theme “Public Service Media Across Boundaries,” the conference Day 1 took place in NHK Chiyoda Media Plaza on 27th of August, which consisted of three sessions. The second part of the series that reports the content and outcomes of RIPE@2014 features Session 3—a symposium themed “Disaster Coverage and Role of Public Broadcaster.”
In the symposium, panelists from Asian countries with hands-on experience of disaster reporting shared their experience and views on how Asian broadcasters are dealing with disaster coverage in this disaster-prone zone of the world. Among them, a news reporter of ABS-CBN of the Philippines spoke about his experience when he reported Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013. His presentation showed how commercial broadcasters endeavored to play a public role in the Philippines that has no public service broadcasters through broadcasting to protect the safety and the lives of the citizens by transcending the framework of usual news coverage. A panelist from the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) introduced the concerted efforts of Asian broadcasters which had been reinforcing their disaster coverage capacity through international cooperation since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. A panelist from NHK presented how NHK had improved disaster coverage since the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011, focusing on the utilization of Hybridcast—TV-service system making use of the integration of broadcasting and communications—and big data in disaster reporting. Meanwhile, a delegate from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) touched on how European broadcasters perceive and report disasters in Asia and concluded that we all live in the global village, and, for public service broadcasters, national boundaries should never be the boundary of news reporting.