So predictable, you can set your watch by it: A catastrophe or crisis makes headlines, and TV news operations compete to see who can get their celebrity on-air talent to the scene first:
Cooper, Amanpour among TV journalists to Japan U.S. broadcast and cable networks, some of which were short-staffed Friday morning in Japan, are now sending top anchors and correspondents to the northeastern region of the country that’s been ravaged by [Friday’s] earthquake and tsunami. . . .
[Christiane] Amanpour — who’s recently escaped the Beltway to host “This Week” from Tucson, Cairo, and Libya — will host the Sunday public affairs show from Japan, too. . . .
CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who devoted several shows to the Haiti earthquake in 2010, plans to leave for Japan after [Friday night’s] show, a spokeswoman confirmed.
As with the Egypt protest Live-From-Cairo Derby — where the rioting mobs were in danger of getting crowded out of Tahrir Square by all the American network anchors setting up for live remotes — this pilgrimage of TV talking-heads to Japan has absolutely nothing to do with providing news coverage.
Each of these networks has foreign correspondents who could do the job of reporting from the scene. No, let’s call this what it is: A publicity stunt, a star-system celebrity-status game where it’s not enough to let reporters do the reporting, but instead the networks want to send their Famous Faces With Big Names.
The purpose is to signify that this is really important news and that their anchors aren’t just Pretty People who read a Teleprompter in a Manhattan TV studio but are actual honest-to-God journalists. It’s like how, when TV news does a story about Congress, it’s important that the reporter be on camera with the Capitol dome in the background — “See? He’s really there at the Capitol, covering Congress!” — even if what he’s reporting is just stuff that anybody could have picked up off the AP wire.
So now we’ll get to watch footage of Christiane Amanpour and Anderson Cooper walking through scenes of earthquake-and-flood devastation, because it’s important for the networks that we see this story “reported” by their $4-million-a-year superstars.
Beyond the transparent synthetic bogusness of it all, what bugs me is knowing that these jetsetting anchors-on-the-scene are greedily gobbling up air time that, by all rights, ought to go to their networks’ usual Asian/Pacific bureau reporters (who, of course, get a mere fraction of the fat salaries paid to Amanpour, Cooper, et al.).
A quake-hit Japanese nuclear plant reeling from an explosion at one of its reactors has also lost its emergency cooling system at another reactor, Japan’s nuclear power safety agency said on Sunday. The emergency cooling system is no longer functioning at the No. 3 reactor at Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, requiring the facility to urgently secure a means to supply water to the reactor, an official of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told a news conference.
So the earlier “everything-under-control” claims from Japanese officials now seem to be unraveling. And there goes my Saturday nap. Please, somebody hit the tip jar for a few bucks, just so I can plausibly explain to my wife that this constant updating is worth the effort.
UPDATE 6:30 p.m. ET: Allahpundit started aggregating the Fukushima nuclear crisis nearly 18 hours ago and finally confesses that he is “now completely confused” by “a perfect storm of journalistic confusion” in which the “facts on the ground are changing rapidly” — and this really isn’t surprising, given the nature of the story.
Look: All of this is taking place on the other side of the world, where people speak another language. It involves highly complex technical issues. Obviously, safety concerns prevent reporters from going directly to the reactor sites and providing us with eyewitness accounts. You have multiple news organizations, each competing to have the latest information or to get the next exclusive scoop. And you have Japanese officials with a clear interest in minimizing the perception that this is a total unmitigated clusterfark.
Ergo: We must recognize that we don’t know what we don’t know, and must avoid the temptation to believe that we know stuff we actually don’t.
I don’t speak Japanese and I’m not an expert on nuclear power. However, based on my gut-instinct from 25 years in the news business, based on the way official no-need-to-panic statements keep getting contradicted by developing events, and based on the principle that it’s better to be safe than sorry, my current best estimate of the situation is either (a) catastrophic apocalypse or (b) apocalyptic catastrophe.
(Your mileage my vary.)
My advice: Get some sleep. And when you wake up Sunday morning, go to Denny’s and have their Grand Slam breakfast while reading the local newspaper. Then go back home and drink a couple brews while watching a basketball game on TV. At that point, you can then safely log back onto the Internet and try to figure out what actually happened Saturday.
Trust me, you’ll thank me for this advice. If Charlie Sheen had listened to my advice, he never would have lost his CBS show (and he wouldn’t be shagging skanks, because Denise Richards would be begging him for a second chance to make their marriage work out).
Reactors at two Japanese power plants can no longer cool radioactive substances, a government official said Saturday, adding that a small leak had been detected at one of the facilities.
Atomic material has seeped out of one of the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s five nuclear reactors, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo, said Kazuo Kodama, a spokesman for Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency.
Potentially dangerous problems in cooling radioactive material appear to have cropped up there, as well as at another of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. nuclear plants, Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan’s ambassador to the United States, confirmed to CNN. . . .
The Fukushima Daini and Fukushima Daiichi power plants are separate facilities located in different towns in northeastern Japan’s Fukushima prefecture. . . .
Kodama said the cooling system had failed at three of the four such units of the Daini plant.
Temperatures of the coolant water in that plant’s reactors soared to above 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported, an indication that the cooling system wasn’t working.
Authorities subsequently ordered residents within 3 kilometers of that facility to evacuate as “a precaution,” Fujisaki said. That plant was also added to the Japanese nuclear agency’s emergency list, along with the Daiichi plant.
So there are indications of cooling-system failure at Daini as well as at Daiichi. If this CNN report is both (a) accurate and (b) based on the latest information, then the problems may actually be growing worse. Japanese officials have ordered evacuations around the endangered plants, involving throusands of people.
UPDATE 3:15 p.m. ET: Both reprehensible and incomprehensible: Idiots using Facebook to vent sadistic revenge-for-Pearl-Harbor sentiments. No decent American could possibly harbor ill will toward the Japanese people more than six decades after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Japan’s unconditional surrender. From a quick glance, I’d guess about 95% of the Facebookers saying this stuff are adolescents or college-age and — no need to guess about this — 100% of them are stupid assholes.
UPDATE 4:15 p.m. ET: In the comments below, longtime commenter and loyal tip-jar hitter Jeff S. from Walla Walla describes the cable-news chatter:
[W]e are seeing yet another aspect of Rumor Control during a disaster: “There’s not enough real news, so let’s get some experts to speculate and offer their opinions. Because, y’know, we need C. O. N. T. E. N. T., regardless of the source.”
Next: survivors of Three Miles Island and Chernyobl are interviewed for their perspective.
This business of TV networks covering a breaking news event by filling the time with whatever comes to hand — “And now, a child psychologist tells parents how to cope with children’s questions about the nuclear meltdown …” — is one of the great evils of modern journalism.
When I worked as a national news editor at The Washington Times, sometimes one of the bosses would come over and say, “Hey, CNN just said so-and-so — make sure that’s mentioned in Ralph’s story.” Sometimes this latest item from TV would be true, important and clearly relevant. But sometimes it would be dubious, trivial or a mere sideshow to the main subject of the story.
There were times when I’d get one of these “CNN-just-said” items thrown at me, right on the verge of deadline to send the story to the copy desk, so I’d just jam it in somewhere and hit the “send” button. And then the reporter whose byline was on the story would look in the copy queue — checking to see what the edited version looks like, as every smart reporter always should — and come storming over to my desk: “What the hell? That CNN item is a piece of thinly-sourced rumor that I already checked out and my sources say it’s crap. Get it the hell out of my story, and if you ever do that again without checking with me first, so help me God, I’ll strangle you!” (That rant is a near-verbatim quote of longtime crime-and-justice reporter Jerry Seper chewing me out at the top of his lungs, a traumatic experience that tends to imbed itself deep in the neural pathways, and one which I would not recommend for sensitive souls.)
See, print journalism creates a permanent record. It’s not just Pretty People running their yaps to fill time between commercials. But sometimes newspaper editors forget that, and start trying to match their coverage to what the Pretty People are saying on TV, and bad results ensue. Here on the Internet, the blogospheric medium is kind of like TV in that, when a big story is breaking, you can update-update-update to keep pace with developments. But it is also a matter of the written word, which has the permanent-record quality we associate with print journalism. If the medium is the message, as McLuhan said, then being a good messenger requires us to study and understand the nature of the medium.
Japanese officials said on Saturday there had been an explosion at a nuclear power plant following Friday’s huge earthquake, blowing off the roof of the structure, bringing down walls and causing a radiation leak of unspecified proportions.
UPDATE: Lots of ominous stuff in that Stratfor report, including this sentence: “At this point, events in Japan bear many similarities to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.”
Here’s a video report about the explosion at the plant:
Japanese officials battling to prevent a meltdown at a nuclear power station after Friday’s record earthquake are using seawater to try and cool a reactor and prevent damage to the chamber holding its radioactive core.
An explosion at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai- Ichi nuclear power station yesterday destroyed the walls of its No. 1 reactor building and injured four people. A hydrogen leak caused the blast, which didn’t damage the steel chamber, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a briefing yesterday.
Asia’s biggest utility “has decided to fill the containment with seawater,” Edano said. Japan’s Nuclear Safety Agency couldn’t confirm a meltdown at the plant and monitoring around the reactor is showing that radiation is falling, spokesman Shinji Kinjyo said today.
Trying to spin a nuclear reactor meltdown? Charlie Sheen should hire those guys to do his P.R.
UPDATE II: There is an apocalyptic quality to the sequence described in this Economist report:
First came a violent earthquake. Then a devastating tsunami followed. Now an explosion at a nuclear power plant — and the release of radioactive material — has added to Japan’s woes.
And still, the spin:
There was a momentary sense of relief on Saturday evening when the government assured the public that the explosion had not been caused by the meltdown of the reactor.
Let’s presume — as is always the safe presumption in such scenarios — that the situation is actually worse than officials say it is. As Bill Clinton might say, “It depends on what your definition of ‘meltdown’ is.”
On the one hand, there is a specific, technical, scientific meaning for the word “meltdown” and, if officials are to be believed, has not happened at Fukushima Daiichi. On the other hand, there is the ordinary layman’s understanding of “meltdown,” which is less precise: Something very, very bad has happened, resulting in a significant release of radiation and OMIGOD RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
Whether or not this situation meets the first definition, it certainly meets the second and — unless and until we see Fukushima Daiichi erupt in a fireball mushroom cloud — I doubt any Japanese officials will ever publicly call this a “meltdown.”
The Japanese situation appears to be roughly analogous to the Three Mile Island incident in the United States, where authorities struggled for days to contain an improperly cooled reactor core but were able to avert a widespread release of nuclear material.
“We were in a situation as I recall then very similar to where we are now, where we were told by news media in 1979 that there was a core melt accident unfolding, we didn’t know how serious it would become, and what would happen,” Hibbs tells Newsmax.
At least one of the reactors in Japan, and perhaps more, “are on the path of a core-melt accident. It’s called a loss of coolant accident. . . . And it’s up to the Japanese authorities, together with the industries in that country, to find a way to stem this problem,” he said.
Dava Castillo notes that “meltdown” is a colloquial term — a catastrophic event resulting in the release of radioactive material — and in the colloquial sense, I think Fukushima Daiichi has already passed the point of being a “meltdown.”
Fears of a nuclear meltdown in Japan have subsided after a reactor that was damaged in Friday’s devastating earthquake reportedly emerged intact from an explosion.
A day after the country was thrown into chaos by a fierce tsunami triggered by the largest earthquake in Japan’s history, the country was, for a few terrifying hours, bracing itself for a possible nuclear catastrophe. . . .
After a few nerve-wracking hours, however, the government and the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, said the damage had been confined to the walls and roof surrounding the reactor, sparing its metal casing.
The chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, told a televised press conference that radiation around the plant had, in fact, started to decrease.
A “tiny” amount of radiation had leaked earlier in the day when officials attempted to relieve pressure inside the reactor.
So, Richard asks, which are we to believe, the Stratfor report that calls the incident a “meltdown” or this report with its Chip Dillard “all is well” tone of reassurance?
THE FUCKING ROOF BLEW OFF!
OK? I mean, sure, “officials say” everything’s just hunky-dory with the reactor itself, but when there’s a massive explosion that destroys the building that houses the reactor, excuse me for suspecting that the “officials say” version of the story might be a bit too sunny-side-up.
A reporter for the Christian Science Monitor is professionally obligated to accept what officials say at a press conference as legit, unless there is some specific information that contradicts the “officials say” version. But I’m not doing a dateline-Tokyo straight-news report here. I’ve got no inside sources or special expertise in nuclear-power operations. Right now, I’m just a guy aggregating stuff I’ve found on the Web and trying to determine whether the panic-induced stains in our pants should be yellow or brown.
Also: Commenters have noted a surprising absence of Godzilla jokes. Obviously, it has been an intense struggle to resist my natural instinct to treat the news as an endless series of straight-man set-ups for which I am expected to deliver the punchline. But given that the death toll from the Japanese earthquake-tsunami disaster is feared to be in the thousands, I think it’s best to continue to resist.
“Some economists have argued that a quake could actually lift the economy in the long run, by requiring a surge in rebuilding spending.”
Does that mean that we could help the economy by regularly trashing all entitlement programs, say, by forcing them to expire with the departure of the executive who signed them into law? All of the effort to come up with new databases, implementation of lessons learned, and shiny new staffing would be some right jolly good economic stimulus, I expect.
Consider this: what you’re seeing the US do now is essentially what Ron Paul’s non-interventionist approach would look like.
So consider that, ye Paul fans, as the butcher’s bill grows and reddens.
On Friday, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Politico published one of those Smartest Guy in the Room analytical pieces that always annoy the crap out of me, and ought to annoy everyone else, too. It amounts to Vandehei and Allenplaying GOP strategists:
The Republican Party is undergoing a messy but unmistakable 20-month transformation from fanatically anti-Obama to fanatically anti-spending, providing top party officials a new and intriguing playbook for recapturing the White House in 2012. . . .
If a presidential candidate could harness the smaller-government conservatism, temper it enough to avoid a blatant overreach and articulate a vision for a prosperous future for the country, it’s not hard to imagine swing voters finding such a person appealing.
You see what they did there? It is now March 2011, but VandeHei and Harris have their crystal ball so finely tuned that it tells them (contingent on a bunch stuff that follows an “if”) what kind of candidate and what kind of message swing voters will find appealing in November 2012.
Somebody get me those guys’ phone number. Next time I go to Vegas, I’ll just call them up and ask, “Red or black?” before I walk into the casino and — magic! — make my fortune at the roulette table.
Go read the whole damned thing, which includes some obligatory bashing of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin — “flamboyant and controversial figures”! “bombastic voices”! — with blind quotes from “one top [Republican] aide” and a “senior administration official,” etc.
Hmmm. I wonder what you’d find if you looked back to March 2009, to see if Vandehei and Harris foretold the massive Republican victory of November 2010?
Because I’ve got $10 that says they didn’t have a fucking clue. Just to hedge my bet, let’s peek:
March 17, 2009: “Even when Obama went before the cameras to express outrage at the AIG bonuses, he seemed to nod to the contrived nature of it. The aide said that the White House is not as focused on ‘the immediate sound bite about AIG’ as it is on ‘the fact that everything we do demonstrates … that he’s on the side of the American people [and] that he’s fighting for them.
‘They believe it wholeheartedly — poll numbers show that,’ the aide said, accurately describing the data. . . . ‘His entire presidency is about being on the side of the American people. ‘”
March 21, 2009: “So far, the president has not alienated the business community — and, in some cases, has found ways to win over executives who had been skeptical at best.”
March 30, 2009: “He was caught flat-footed by the AIG bonus uproar, but since then Obama has presented himself as skeptical of a government-only solution and tired of business-as-usual on Wall Street. The White House used a well-choreographed rollout to dominate the news-cycle the past 24 hours with his tough love approach – and present Obama as a fair-minded centrist when it comes to bailouts.”
So in March 2009 there wasn’t the slightest foreshadowing that Obama’s disastrous economic policies would cost Democrats a net loss of 63 seats in November 2010, yet here we’ve got the same writers trying to tell us which candidate and which message the GOP needs to win over swing voters in November 2012? I know some of you guys hate Dave Weigel, but I’m quoting him anyway:
In March 1983, unemployment was 10.3 percent, Ronald Reagan looked like a possible loser in the next year’s election, and Democrats were talking about the deficit-exploding combination of his tax cuts and spending. In November 1984 unemployment was 7.2 percent, Walter Mondale was promising to cut the deficit by raising taxes, and Ronald Reagan was beating him in 49 states.
Elections are about a lot of things no reporter can predict, not even the Smartest Guys in the Room.
Loren Burke, 23, La Selva Beach, a construction worker from the Westside, was surfing Friday morning said he went surfing with three friends. Burke grew up in the county and doesn’t remember ever hearing a tsunami warning before. He said he was excited seeing the ocean this morning, but didn’t expect to see a big wave hit. “The waves were about 7 foot and it was a lot of fun,” Burke said after he got out of the water just after 8 a.m.
“A lot of fun.” Loren Burke, I salute you!
UPDATE: As mentioned earlier, I made a contribution to the Red Cross to help disaster-relief efforts in Japan, and they sent me an auto-reply thank-you e-mail:
The American Red Cross is acting swiftly to put your donation to work in communities affected by the earthquake in Japan and tsunami throughout the Pacific. We are supporting relief work to meet critical needs. On behalf of those we serve by our humanitarian mission, thank you.
So that’s pretty cool, and I urge all readers to go give the Red Cross what you can — $10, $20, whatever — because the folks in Japan are going to need all the help we can give them.
I have a mind of my own, and I don’t need to be told I’m a victim. Or that society must change utterly for my convenience. Or that I need advocates in order to be just as good as any man. . . . I’m an at-home mom with a busload of kids, and I don’t feel that I’ve wasted my life or missed out on a career. Instead, like many women in my position, I have sacrificed things I consider of lesser value in order to do something I consider both important and rewarding.
The feminists won’t recognize that. So they don’t speak for me. . . .
Attagirl! (Wait: Is “attagirl” sexist? Like I should be worrying about such things at this stage of the argument . . .) Her coments echo Natalie Portman’s Oscar-night declaration that motherhood is “the most important role of my life.”
The lady’s testimony — “mind of my own . . . busload of kids” — points to one of those fingernails-on-a-chalkboard problems with feminist rhetoric: If being “just a mom” is a task beneath the dignity of intelligent women, doesn’t this ensure that a majority of future generations will be the offspring of idiots? Continue reading ‘A Vagina . . . and a Brain’ →
Few things are more predictable in modern discourse than the instinctive opportunism of those who, as soon as tragic news makes headlines, seek to turn it to some narrow political advantage.
Decent people are appalled by such posturing. What comes next: The Great Compassion Rodeo, in which liberals display their moral superiority by claiming to care more about Japanese tsunami victims than the rest of us. But you know who’s actually helping tsunami survivors? The United States Navy, that’s who:
Eight warships are headed to Japan to render disaster relief in the wake of a catastrophic magnitude 8.9 earthquake that left hundreds dead Friday. The quake unleashed a tsunami that is tearing across the Pacific. . . .
“Our deepest sympathies go out to our close friends in Japan as they deal with this tragedy,” Adm. Patrick Walsh, Pacific Fleet commander, said statement posted on his Facebook page. “U.S. Pacific Fleet is making preparations and posturing our naval assets to provide assistance when directed. We stand ready to support those in need. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Japan.”
None of the 38,000 military personnel assigned to Japan are dead, Pentagon spokesman Marine Col. Dave Lapan said Friday. He said six ships are headed to Japan to render aid, if called upon: the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan; amphibious assault ship Essex; dock landing ships Germantown, Tortuga and Harpers Ferry; and amphibious command ship Blue Ridge.
In addition, cruiser Chancellorsville and destroyer Preble, along with Reagan, have been ordered to “proceed at best safe speed toward Japan,” Pacific Fleet said on its Facebook page at noon Eastern time.
My co-blogger is a career Navy man, of course, but he’s deployed ashore in landlocked Kabul, and we have no reason to suspect they’ll send him to provide emergency IT support in Japan. Each of us must do what we can where we are, and all of us can give to the Red Cross. I just did.
UPDATE: Now, back to the news . . . Earlier today, I was watching TV and they reported that, despite warnings, surfers were trying to get onto Southern California beaches and ride the tsunami-enhanced waves. Further north, a reminder of the dangerous reality: “A 25-year-old man was declared dead Friday afternoon after being swept out to sea off a northern California beach while trying to photograph a tsunami launched by the massive earthquake near Japan, according to a Del Norte County, California.”
UPDATE II: Instapundit finds a news story about those tsunami-loving surfers. If anybody finds a story with names and/or photos of those dudes, please link it in the comments. There is something distinctly American about guys who are willing to risk their lives for a super-gnarly wave. They deserve their 15 minutes of fame.
