happybaboon wrote:Is your telly OK?

TV picture is pink and green. It's fine with the PS3, so I'm assuming something with the component cables is broken. Oh the humanity!

Buds wrote:

Oli wrote:

bubbaa wrote:there are vast areas in the region with relatively minor damage.

media fest.
politician fest
alot of dramatisation

and it was quite scary

i'm helping neighbours and relatives - I like doing that

Probably not very minor to the people involved.

Yip, tell that to my daughter who was hugging the door frame most of the morning...

what i meant was that in addition to a few areas of severe damage the vast majority of the area suffered relatively minor damage. If you watch/listen to the media you might think otherwise . . . . . .. Equally my children were shitting themselves too - does the media and dramatisation help that ?- I think not. There are some pretty distorted images that come out of the media that can really confuse children about severity of events. Adult dramatising it and wallowing in it definitely doesn't help that. In my opinioN.

E Dogg Capizzle wrote:

happybaboon wrote:Is your telly OK?

TV picture is pink and green. It's fine with the PS3, so I'm assuming something with the component cables is broken. Oh the humanity!

Or the earthquake made your antenna/dish move about ...

bubbaa wrote:

Buds wrote:

Oli wrote:

bubbaa wrote:there are vast areas in the region with relatively minor damage.

media fest.
politician fest
alot of dramatisation

and it was quite scary

i'm helping neighbours and relatives - I like doing that

Probably not very minor to the people involved.

Yip, tell that to my daughter who was hugging the door frame most of the morning...

what i meant was that in addition to a few areas of severe damage the vast majority of the area suffered relatively minor damage. If you watch/listen to the media you might think otherwise . . . . . .. Equally my children were shitting themselves too - does the media and dramatisation help that ?- I think not. There are some pretty distorted images that come out of the media that can really confuse children about severity of events. Adult dramatising it and wallowing in it definitely doesn't help that. In my opinioN.

Yeah, I know what you mean - it's like when the two atom bombs were dropped on Japan in WW2; all that fuss and the rest of Japan wasn't even touched. What was the big deal?

Oli wrote:Yeah, I know what you mean - it's like when the two atom bombs were dropped on Japan in WW2; all that fuss and the rest of Japan wasn't even touched. What was the big deal?

no thats not what i mean.
hiroshima and nagasaki bombings were acts of war that killed between 150,000-300,000 people after an extensive bombing of the rest of japan for months.
todays earthquake was an natural event that scared the crap out of many people did significant damage to some property and a little damage to many properties and resulted in zero deaths and very few major injuries.

I am in chch. I spent last night with terrified children, haven't slept since 4.30 because of the need to look after my children and because of the pain from an injury during the earthquake (aggravating of a pre-existing condition)
I spent all day cleaning up neighbours properties and giving my reassurance to really worried family and friends
I will spend a large amount of my day tomorrow cleaning up the mess in my own house while trying to care for my family and friends.
I will answer their questions about what has happened and ally their fears about the future in a calm manner that reassures them.
because there is fuck all else to do that will help them.
winding them up about my fears is unhelpful.
saying how terrible the damage is unhelpful and in my opinion inaccurate.

I think media frequently present a concentrated series of visual or verbal images that give and impression of widespread severity that isn't accurate in cases like this.

i do understand however that some people may perceive that an earthquake that resulted in zero deaths is a disaster.
i think that lacks the perspective.
In my opinion disasters are when major harm occurs to people and society and in my opinion this hasn't occurred.
Each year in this country 300-400 people die on the roads and a much larger number are maimed permanently.
as it is zero died in todays earthquake and very few were harmed with any real severity
There could have been a big human death toll had this earthquake occurred at a different time of day or week.

I am not worried especially about further earthquakes as I understand the Richter scale is logarithmic and a force 6 would be less then 1/10 of what we have experienced already

I'm think things aren't too bad and could have been dramatically worse and are dramatically worse frequently for people all across our planet, for instance, Pakistan.

That is my perspective, I'm happy to hear yours

Well mine is that I'm very sorry for your experiences, especially as they are aggravated by existing issues, but I think that a disaster is relative. You and your children may have been frightened but lots of people have lost their homes - that IS a disaster to them, and it's worthy of reporting. Of course it could have been worse, and people could have died, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a disaster nonetheless.

From my perspective the media has been reporting on the biggest earthquake in NZ since 1931 with reasonable balance - i.e. being at pains to point out that it could have been much worse, but also showing that the damage in some areas was severe. Also I think they've been doing a good job of trying to make people think about preparing for further shocks...of course their presentation is at times somewhat theatrically dramatic, but that's just the way all news is presented these days.

As for politicising it, I would imagine that if the civic leaders weren't showing interest in these post-Katrina days that the public would be baying for their blood. And I think it's part of their duties, to show that they are prepared to get to grips with the effects from close up, even if some folk think it's just a cynical move with votes in mind.

I don't think there has been any fear-mongering at all and I don't get why you have a beef with it, but I'm going to put it down to the stress you must be under.

Kia kaha, and I hope everything turns out okay.

My kids getting more frightened by distorted images offends me - would be pretty nice not to have the dramatisation so I could watch it and get some information without needing to re-interpret it for, or ban, the children.
So I guess as I see it it is a little bit of fear mongering (remembering that many people don't really question what the media present to them)

The stuff i saw made it look like chch had been largely flattened and most of the population was terrified. Which was pretty different from what I was seeing.

Saturation reporting of damage combined with media encouraging exhibitionistic emotional displays

theatrically dramatic

is not really questioned much. I don't think its good reporting.


after you put it that way i do begrudgingly accept that they do have to front up (and make the most of the wonderful opportunity they are presented ) and its pretty easy to be cynical about politicians, especially when we are in the middle of a local election campaign

I wish the fucking aftershocks would stop!!

I appreciate the kind thoughts

I don't think they deliberately made it look worse than it was, I think they just showed the damage because showing undamaged houses and buildings would be kind of pointless. I didn't get from either TV 1 or 3 that the whole city was flattened or that the population was terrified - far from it actually. The radio today was doing an awesome job too, Kim Hill's show in particular.

Vicki McKay, was great too. She was doing the graveyard shift on RNZ National when the quake struck, I turned on the radio just afterwards, She was assuring everyone it is alright and not to panic. She was reading all the texts that people were sending her, that's when I realised that Chch got the brunt of it. It wasn't till I checked out Stuff.co and saw the photos of the old brick buildings that had collapsed and the major cracks in the road, I thought this is pretty serious. I was relieved when I spoke to my bro-in-law in Burnside that my sister and family were fine, only thing that happened to them was the CD's fell from the stand.

I wasn't under the impression that all of Chch was flattened,(you could see that modern buildings were still in one piece) in fact I think they were overall very lucky as I recall quakes of less magnitude in the world have killed thousands and flattened the whole city due to the sub standard building codes. I also think if it was a weekday say afternoon, there would have been lots more casualties and most likely fatalities. I don't think the media blew it out of proportion. Just glad to hear that the canty vorbers are safe.

Well I should get to bed as, I have mostly been awake (apart from a couple of nana naps) since 4.30am sat morning. Yes I was beginning to think if the shaking doesn't ease off, my tile roof might start to fall in on me. My cat was lying happily on the bed still as I was standing under the door frame.

The funniest thing was hearing "Good Vibrations" played on RNZ National at 6.45am then Stuart Keith apologising afterwards for the inappropiateness of the song.

Oli wrote:From my perspective the media has been reporting on the biggest earthquake in NZ since 1931 ...

Just off the top of my head we had a 7.8 in Fiordland last year (have had a few 7's there over the years). Ok probably the largest near a major population centre since Hawkes Bay in 1931.

Thumbs for Radio NZ

I think the media has been fair in reporting. Sounds like the place is as expected from a shock of that intensity.
Some local people are reporting in the heat of the moment. i.e my nephew told me the South Brighton was messed up badly. I said it should not be as it is built to stand up in that intensity quake, and I asked did he just mean the access roads before and after it are badly cracked. Yeah the jus the access roads are messed which are an easy fix, unlike a bridge.
However, the sewage could be a long $1 billion fix.

Sickman wrote:I think the media has been fair in reporting.

Yarr. Bubbaa just seems to be having an unnecessary bout of cynicism over this.

Farken aftershocks can piss off.

Woken up a number of times last night. Awful feeling hearing it arrive and feeling the ground start to shake and you automatically think that the big event is all happening again Definitely does not help knowing that there is supposed to be a reasonably big aftershock on the way sometime this week.

I can see Bubba's point of view. I think the Radio NZ coverage just after the even was really good. However there was some other reporting that was a bit hysterical.

In general the reporting was not too bad.