|
How to Prevent a Media Earthquake
Seismologist Dr. Garry Rogers on the Press
By Trevor D’Arcy
January 29, 2008
Garry Rogers is a rare scientist who has become well versed in media relations. As a senior researcher with the Geological Survey of Canada in Sidney BC, as well as ‘on call’ seismologist for Canada’s Southwest, Rogers does between 100 and 200 interviews a year and up to 500 during busier years.
He is known as Canada’s earthquake expert.
Being the go-to-guy for earthquakes is a flattering, but tricky hat to wear. Neither discussing your scientific research with reporters nor calmly explaining why the earth is shaking are easy tasks. Earthquakes are touchy subjects, especially along BC’s West Coast, and while Rogers’ overall experience with the media has been good, sometimes his words inadvertently send shockwaves across the country.
The latest example was an article on the front page of The Globe and Mail in February of 2007, which read:
B.C. put on alert for huge quake; Vancouver Island entering ‘rush hour' of seismic activity.
Scientists have alerted British Columbia's emergency-planning department to the possibility of a catastrophic earthquake striking the province's southwest coast next week.
“The headline on that article and the lead in sense were absolutely outrageous,” said Rogers. “That headline got picked up by the Canadian Press and various other things and went zooming around the world and all of a sudden it changed from an interesting scientific event…to we had predicted a large quake on the West Coast, which we had not.”
This wholesale disturbance was then followed by unsavoury aftershocks.
“For the next week, we did another 30 or 40 interviews beating off people who were wanting to know about this big earthquake we predicted. A lot of people got upset,” explained Rogers.
The February example illustrated a consistent flaw Rogers experiences with the media. “There is a big disconnect between the reporter and the headline writers,” he said, and attributed the disconnect to televised reports as well.
Reporters, he said, generally do a good job of covering the story, but caption writers tend to cause these kinds of miscommunications. He suspects their motivations are to “draw an audience and sell newspapers,” rather than accurate reporting.
Jane Armstrong, the reporter for The Globe and Mail who wrote the article, did not confirm these motives, but did say the headline and lead were misleading.
“We [reporters] don’t have any control over what gets played or how it’s played or what the headline will be,” she said. “All you can do is just write it the way it was told to you and hope it’s accurate.”
For people living along BC’s Southwest, the pressure of an impending earthquake is very real. They are sitting on top of the Cascadia subduction zone, where the Juan de Fuca and the North American continental plates are overlapping. Subduction zones are known to produce the world’s largest earthquakes, best exemplified by the quake and tsunami that rocked Indonesia in 2004.
According to researchers, Cascadia’s big quake will occur sometime within the next 500 years. This may sound like a lot of breathing room, but small, infrequent quakes produced by the subduction zone keep the region on edge. That, and every passing day brings the big one just a little bit closer.
This pressure also applies to the media, giving them increased responsibility in how they cover the issue.
While Rogers finds the media does a good job, particularly the local media, he has noticed that reporters who are familiar with the issue are dwindling.
“What tends to happen is newspapers gang together in chains and there is one expert across the country,” he said. “You don’t have a local reporter that’s used to dealing with science stories.”
He believes this makes it more difficult for him and other scientists to explain their research and it also increases the media’s margin of error. Armstrong paralleled these thoughts, saying mistakes tend to happen more often between bureaus.
Despite a seeming lack of resources within the media, Rogers appreciates the onus isn’t all on them. Scientists are not the easiest people to understand, so he is using his experience to improve things on his end. He helps colleagues work with the media.
“Scientists are always over cautious…I think most scientists tend to overemphasize those things [errors and uncertainties] and not get to the basic point,” he said. “When you’re talking to the public, they don’t want all of these details, they want the story and what’s a reasonable interpretation?”
His advice is, “You’re explaining it to your mother. How would you explain it?”
|
|
GARRY ROGERS
A graduate of UBC and the University of Hawaii, Dr. Rogers is the leading authority on Canada’s west coast earthquakes. He is a senior research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada and a professor at the University of Victoria.
Dr. Rogers currently serves on the Canadian National Committee for Earthquake Engineering, which is responsible for earthquake provisions in the National Building Code, on advisory committees to the Earthquake Program of the US Geological Survey, the Southern California Earthquake Center, NEPTUNE Canada and the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics and as a national representative on the Pacific Tsunami Warning System.
|
