We may never fully comprehend the scale of the human horror in Haiti. Each day, we learn about unspeakable levels of human tragedy and suffering. In response, we watch, donate, cry, grow depressed and snicker at the bureaucratic bungling of some relief efforts. But unless we or a loved one has been directly touched by this tragedy — at some point our senses become overloaded — we are forced to move on to other daily events.
Our brains’ inability to grasp all facets of this catastrophe is surely not the fault of CNN and in particular, the efforts of Anderson Cooper. The nightly, live, two-hour program he has hosted since the day after the January 12th earthquake has been a journalistic tour de force.
Conventional electronic journalists and their networks (including Cooper and CNN) have long done a superior job of telling authentic stories amid disaster or crisis. CNN has frequently stood above competitors (remember Peter Arnett in Baghdad?) by taking advantage of its news pedigree and singular network purpose — focusing exclusively on news programming. Still, the quality, story clarity and impact of Cooper’s reporting from Haiti have been astonishingly good.
To my eyes it is even more significant that his remarkable coverage has been principally shaped by “old,” analog modes of journalistic storytelling. In most crises, our critical need to know factual information and the compelling nature of the crisis itself turns journalists into information stewards who simply collect, assemble and report. Little “value” must be added to the tenets of the story because the crisis itself (from a media consumer perspective) is inherently “valuable” or newsworthy.
But Cooper’s program has gone further by employing narrative storytelling. The facts and figures of the Haitian tragedy are deftly injected within a story context. This heightens our understanding of just how bad the situation is because it puts everything into a context that our human minds can grasp. While our brains have been compared to computers for their ability to store and retrieve information, what sets us apart as humans is our ability to organize information in a way (story and narrative) that makes sense of numbers and statistics that otherwise would simply numb us to the tragedy.
This is one task where social media cannot carry the heavy water: building the context.
Certainly, social media is a vital information source for news, helps reconnect families and performs other important roles in the recovery in Haiti. Social media absolutely facilitates the coverage of CNN, Cooper and everyone else. But by itself social media content is inherently acontextual — it’s raw material that needs the injection of narrative to provide meaning. Without the strengths of story and narrative to give social media content shape and flavor, social media could become the tofu of all media types, equally fascinating and disjointed, whether used to report a Tiger Woods sighting or report on an earthquake catastrophe.
It is journalistic, and more importantly, authentic storytelling skills “hard wired” if you will, from our analog brain structure that in this case has simultaneously informed us, touched our humanity, and ultimately broken our hearts each evening.
The quality of journalistic storytelling from Cooper and CNN is remarkable and without peer. And it’s even more remarkable when you consider that the ancient power of storytelling —skillfully applied — is what connects us to one another and the victims of this terrible tragedy, even as we Tweet and Facebook and text our real-time angst and hope for Haiti. No doubt, social media can tell us what happened and what people are thinking — instantly. But to make meaning of something on this scale requires more. It requires the power of narrative and authentic storytelling.
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John Durante is senior marketing associate for WordWrite Communications.
