Reaction Paper #2. Week 7. The media and emergency management have come
to maintain a symbiotic relationship, where one can thrive off the other.
David McNulty Reaction Paper #2 Week 7 The media and emergency management have come to maintain a symbiotic relationship, where one can thrive off the other. Major events in U.S. history have led to greater preparedness to lessen future disasters and brought light on new areas that need to be planned for. Throughout the readings one clear theme emerges, that of the role of preparedness within the discipline of emergency management takes precedent over every other day to day activity. While preparedness is the building block of emergency management, plans and training are applicable when they are comprehensive and adaptable to both the local and the needs of the disaster. Without the ability to adapt the best laid plan will fail. However, as described in Emergency Management “no emergency management organization can function without a strong preparedness capability” (184). Becoming engrained in the process of emergency management, preparedness is a key tool that leaders must use in order to plan for and conceive of future threats to the community. While some preparedness in dealing with emergency management dates back to the 1950’s, with fall out shelters and air raid wardens, real preparedness for threats that society can survive can be linked to one event Three Mile Island in 1979. This event like the school shootings of the 1990’s was given major media coverage propelling the need for preparedness in politicians’ and civilians eyes so much that Hoddow, Bollock and Coppola link Three Mile Island to the roots of FEMA. The impact of this event is seen in every nuclear community today, with warning sirens 15 mile evacuation plans and even passing out iodine tablets to near by residents. In some communities such as Wake County the emergency management office even holds one full time position solely dealing with nuclear plant disasters. Today much of the limited resources of government planners are monopolized by events that the media have given attention to. Before Columbine there were few plans to combat school violence. But with this event politicians and communities across America realized that such an event could happen anywhere, not just effecting a marginalized population. Today such plans for response to school violence are in place and practiced by police and EMS crews around the country. Without large scale media involvement the event could have gone unnoticed outside Colorado, but because of media coverage proliferation of response planning spread across the nation. Preparedness has the possibility of receiving much more attention than mitigation does because it deals with the “functional aspects of emergency management” (HBC 185). When planners and managers are dealing with response and recovery there is a human cost that has occurred and the potential for human suffering exists versus trying to build disaster resistant communities and never have that potential. Because of the potential for human suffering and wide spread disaster such events are also more like to be covered by the media, rather than the latest mitigation technique, another way the media affects the emergency management process.
Disasters covered by the media are more likely to be planned for because of the political process and public scrutiny. Such coverage by the media can lead to concern of civilians and therefore politicians. A Three Mile Island event has a small chance for happening within a well built and managed system. However because of wide spread and sometimes uniformed media coverage, every nuclear community across America must have continuous plans for disaster and maintain lots of equipment and resources in dealing with a nuclear disaster. Because of the political process, politicians that wish to be reelected are sensitive to media criticisms as well. Therefore if the media decides to run pieces on potential disasters those events are more likely to receive attention and scarce resources rather than mitigation efforts. Because FEMA’s rise was out of the Three Mile Island disaster, planning and preparedness continue to be at the forefront of their duties. Such planning has arms like the national response plan where FEMA attempted to standardize response, learning that adaptability and the ability to be understood is just as important as a comprehensive plan.
The media can however, positively effect emergency management by promoting evacuation and disseminating valuable information to residents that the government could not otherwise efficiently communicate. In Randolph Bunside’s article “The Impact of Information and Risk Perception on the Hurricane Evacuation Decision-Making of Greater New Orleans Residents” In this article the author substantially demonstrates the importance of the media on the evacuation and emergency response. Bothe the media and public officials play a significant role in emergencies above the .05 level. Further lending credit to their role in determining actions that government takes within a disaster. As seen through the readings, media has a strong influence over emergency management and its focus. The inception of the nation’s largest emergency management system, FEMA, could arguably be described as a political need resulting from Three Mile Island. And today the media’s influence over the process continues. Today disasters are seen as inevitable, disaster declarations rise and so do costs. However, it is not the mitigation of such disasters that is generally criticized it is the response. In the weeks following Katrina most major media operations focused on the human suffering and governments lack of response rather than the inherent problems of building such a densely populated city in a flood plain or levee construction that failed for any reason. Such media attention has guided emergency management to largely concentrate on preparedness, in order to not look asleep at the wheel. Media has guided the types of disasters we plan for, the scope of the planning and scale of disasters that we as a nation plan for and will continue to do so in the future. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu:2118/smpp/section?content=a782470339&fulltext=713240928 “The Impact of Information and Risk Perception on the Hurricane Evacuation DecisionMaking of Greater New Orleans Residents.” Sociological Spectrum Vol. 27 Iss. 6, November 2007.
