Monday, January 03, 2005
Chinoy: "This is the job. We have to do it."
Source: CNN.com CNN Reliable Sources Host Howard Kurtz interviewed CNN reporter Mike Chinoy on covering the tsunami disaster.
KURTZ: But what about the personal difficulties of journalists covering the story? I spoke with CNN's Mike Chinoy in Indonesia and asked him what kind of toll this was taking on him personally to cover death and destruction on this kind of scale.
CHINOY: It's really tough, Howie, on several levels. On the most elementary level, it's just hard to do the story. The conditions are very tough. When we arrived a few days ago, we flew up here, we got off the plane, we had no place to stay, we had no transport. This town, Banda Aceh, is completely devastated. The first thing we did is we talked somebody into driving us around, and within a few minutes, we found a mass grave, where there were a thousand bloated bodies being shoveled into a pit, and I talked to a 30-year-old woman who had lost her entire family. All her family members were missing, and presumed dead, and she had found the body of her 3-year-old in the street and had brought it to this horrible pit of death, to give it to the people to throw in there. Scenes like that just churn you up inside. And you have to wear a mask because the smell is so bad. Eventually, we found accommodation. We were sleeping on the floor in a, kind of, an old, unused hall, but one night this week, we had three big aftershocks, we all had to run outside, and so I'm now sleeping outside in a sleeping bag. We're using a generator to power our equipment. And literally everywhere you go there are decomposing bodies in the streets and rubble and devastation on the scale I've never seen.
KURTZ: But aside from the very difficult...
CHINOY: So it's tough personally to see it, and it's -- and...
KURTZ: And on that point, is it also difficult to keep your feelings out of it? I mean, you're reporting on this mass devastation, destruction, death, children. I mean, how do you keep your eye on the ball and provide the information without just feeling emotionally overwhelmed?
CHINOY: Well, you know, you just, kind of, have to bite your lip and say, "This is the job. We have to do it." I think there's a reckoning that will come, and it will probably come later. We've all been pretty upset, and physically nauseated and emotionally very upset by a lot of what we've seen, but it's a job and the focus on the job, I think, is a way that you manage emotionally to keep going. But it's harder than anything I've ever dealt with in my career. And my producer and my cameraman, who have been with me for years and years, all over the third world, all over Asia, feel the same way.
KURTZ: Just briefly, with so many tens of thousands of people having perished, how do you try to illustrate the story, kind of bring it to a human level?
CHINOY: Well, you go out on the street and you see this, kind of, macro level, everything is wrecked. But then almost anybody you stop has an unbelievably compelling story. I've heard about, you know, people who were in boats, who were tossed around by the tidal waves and managed to survive, people who lost everything. And they all have a story, and they're all individuals, and they seem very willing to talk about it, in spite of the trauma. And so the focus on the individual illustrates the broader disaster.
# posted by ATN @ 12:02 AM 
